Hugo

A young woman deals with her substance abuse and past trauma in a variety of ways, symbolically representing them and turning them into repeating motifs as she works through it all in front of the camera.

In writer, director, and star, Rianne Cloudie’s new short film, Hugo, we find her stuck inside her own lush apartment with her cat. Whatever has happened to Cloudie before we get there is not shared with us, but instead we see her dealing with the fallout of her emotions and her past as she goes through the motions of ritualising her trauma. At points we see her wrapping her head in cling film, taking a bath in an inky black liquid that could very well pass for blood, sleeping with a giant stuffed snake, crushing up and stabbing at roses – making them into broken flowers that she tries to stuff back in the vase, and then, of course, there’s the eating of the lemons.

It seems as though life has gone out of its way to give Cloudie lemons, lots of them. Her fridge is full to the gunnels with them, packed tightly into bowls, jars, and caddies, and they’re on top of her counters and on her coffee table, too. The problem is that Cloudie seems to be resolutely not making any lemonade out of the lemons she appears to have been given, and it may well be this symbolic representation that gets to the heart of where her problems lie. Instead she’s just going around, moping in her lavishly furnished apartment, wandering about in her jim-jams, repeating the same four or five rituals again and again in an attempt to purge herself of whatever she’s feeling inside, ultimately resolving nothing and getting nowhere.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of time for Cloudie to explain her situation to the viewer, as the entire film barely lasts two-minutes. There are some clues in the symbols, including a jar of what’s labelled, ‘Hugo Tears’, but mostly everything is expressed in a code that only Cloudie is likely to understand. Everything is given to us in short, fast cuts, which flit around the apartment and repeat the various symbols and machinations that Cloudie is trying to share with us, but we barely spend any time on one idea before moving onto the next. There’s no dialogue to go along with the visuals, so there’s no hope for any explanation there, and the sound recording only gives us the incidental sounds of the apartment, as well as maybe a couple of other sounds which never get alluded to, making it difficult to pick up on any narrative or motivation which may be there in the scenario.

After around the sixth or seventh time of viewing, a couple of other symbols flashed up in front of my eyes which hadn’t registered before, due to the extremely quick nature of the editing, and which might have had some bearing on Cloudie’s story. Sadly, anyone watching Hugo for the first (and probably only) time is likely to miss these, and it’s unclear just how important they were anyway, being flashed up and then moved past as the other symbols took precedence in get repeated. While there may be a lot going on in Cloudie’s mind during Hugo, and a lot of it getting represented on the screen in some way, there’s a disconnect between the filmmaker and the viewer in terms of how much of it actually gets relayed.

While the technical aspects of Hugo are all well-handled, the arthouse nature of the film stops the message and the themes from coming through entirely. The symbolism of the narrative is all very well, and Cloudie expresses this in a visual language that works well on screen, but rather than just looking good, it’s important that the audience is taken on the journey along with the main character, and that is something that isn’t entirely achieved in Hugo.