These Days

There is an exaggerated sense of relevance to this film. Or a sense of portentousness; that it is rising to something. It is pretentiously self-important, although based on a simple story of friends and an event in another country. It's in the frame as a rite of passage story, but it is infused with such self-regard and po-faced seriousness as to disarm its viewers.

A major weakness is the length. It is at least 25 minutes too long because it does not have sufficient material and is often stuck with that nauseating trope of such films of showing a montage with a soundtrack to fill in the time and apparently reveal something. In other cases, people parking cars and doing mundane jobs, is barely interesting.

The film is promoted with the angle that a great event occurred in a foreign city which irrevocably changed lives, but frankly, if the character had just gone to the shops to buy groceries, it would have had the same impact.