Feldsher

Rita wants to relive some of her memories and enlists the help of a shady organisation, or a corrupt AI, or some other incongruous hidden entity, in order to do so. Possibly.

In writer and director, Nizar Nassar’s new short film, Feldsher, we are introduced to Rita (Nelson) as she talks to some computer voice to try and find a memory of some guy named Fabio. She enters a world where she finds and faces off against some guy (Garcia) who’s trying desperately hard to look cool and enigmatic while failing miserably at both – oh, and he’s not Fabio. He does have a name, maybe, but the audio is so mismatched to the visuals at this point in the film that it made it almost impossible to remember if he was actually name-checked or not, and I just couldn’t bring myself to sit through such a terrible film again to try and find it out.

They’re both hanging around in some post-industrial wasteland, situated between concrete pillars covered in graffiti, looking out to the sea and the sky beyond. Getting himself up out of a wheelchair where he has been malingering until now, the weird dude starts a timer and starts pointing a gun at Rita’s face. Cue Rita to start questioning her existence and diatribing some turgid philosophical nonsense while she tries to figure out what’s going on. The same scenario then gets recycled three times in a row, getting us nowhere, while the gun gets repointed in Rita’s face and the counter runs towards zero. There’s some incomprehensible exchanges between the two as this goes on, with some casual interludes into other spaces and back to the computer voice, but who knows what any of it has to do with anything because it’s so badly scripted.

Once the timer actually runs out, we’d hope to God that the whole thing would be over, but unfortunately at this point we’re only half-way through. The scenario then runs through again, just this time we’re out in the car park, outside of the concrete ruin, in the dirt and gravel of a grey space. Rita and her adversary do the whole tête-à-tête thing ad nauseum, supposedly expositioning some sort of narrative as they go along, but really it’s all just garbled nonsense that means nothing and takes the audience nowhere. There’s some pleading and some questioning of ‘what’ and ‘why’, but that might as well describe what the viewer is feeling at this point because it’s all such awful garbage.

The idea, I guess, behind Nassar’s film is that it should be an arthouse take on a futuristic, neo-noir thriller, where AI or some other guff is in charge of a person’s therapy, or memories, or recycled trauma, or…. who actually cares? The problem is that the narrative is such resoundingly self-indulgent wank that it mish-mashes everything together in an absurd, all too serious manner, forgetting to leave threads for the audience that could actually help us foster an interest in what’s going on. The stuff we see on screen is incredibly difficult to relate to what is trying to be expressed through the dialogue, and the story, or the meta-story, or the imagined story that takes place somewhere else, is so far removed from the trash we have to sit through, that none of it makes sense.

The one saving grace from Nassar’s travesty is nothing to do with him, but from his DoP, José Orpinelli, who actually knows what he’s doing and who captures some truly beautiful shots. The drone photography matches this, mixing in with AI landscapes and special effects to create a futuristic feel to the world we’re in. The direction is otherwise serviceable with mostly handheld shots of the characters’ faces as they circle each other but with nothing much else to add.

Feldsher is the worst kind of overreaching, self-indulgent, taking itself too seriously, trash, masquerading as an artistic vision. Even Megalopolis (2024) has nothing on this nonsense, and it was really, truly bad. At twenty-six minutes there’s a lot of rubbish to sit through, so if I was you I just wouldn’t bother. It’s not worth your time, or my time, or anyone else’s time. Don’t even tell anyone else about it because they won’t thank you for it. I’m truly hoping that in time this traumatic viewing experience will also eventually become an irretrievable memory lost to the past.