Easy Tiger

I'm a lover of more conservative storytelling, and I admit I often have a love-hate relationship to Euro arthouse films... You know, all those long shots, endless landscape cuts, little dialogues, close up of muted faces etc. Some works for me, more often not. Easy Tiger didn't work for me.

As I read the synopsis here, I guess the director wanted it to be like a novel with audio-visual elements. But I don't think the stylistic choice really worked - like the character's narration shown just as subtitles, or the first big chunk of the young mute character's lines as subtitles without showing him 'speaking' with sign language. When reading a book, the reader often imagines the scene in his mind; when watching a film, we want to see what's going on and then imagine the backstory in mind. If we're to get our information through subtitles only, what's the point of making it into a film?

Overall it all felt rather awkward and not put-together - the characters, dialogues (which there are very little), situation... Actors were all wooden and looked lost, which I believe they indeed were. When the director fails to make sense of his vision to his actors, even the best ones cannot help but act like a bunch of blinds.

Ultimately I'm left with a question of what this was all for. It failed to entertain, touch, stimulate, relate to or even provoke me. It even didn't bore me enough to make me turn it off in the middle.