“As if she was a Blu-Ray and he was a screener.”
The title character of the film Faraday (2013) is an aspiring paranormal investigator who moves into a cheap apartment with his girlfriend Pati (Diana Gómez) that turns out to be haunted. The couple’s relationship starts to go belly-up as her cupcake blog takes off and Faraday (Javier Bódalo) begins an affair with the ghost (Alba García) haunting his apartment.
Director Norberto Ramos del Val cuts back and forth between the bloggers’ videos and a traditional narrative structure. The impetus is to seemingly lampoon influencer culture while simultaneously locating the overlap between Youtube videos and the cinematographic. This device is also a kind of budgetary necessity. Regardless of motive or intent, the resulting montage of Faraday is a chaotic jumble of off-color jokes, corny video effects, and sappy melodrama.
Faraday is at its most cohesive when the footage is “archival” and functions as flashbacks. Here the narrative thread is a foregone conclusion because the character who is the subject of these pseudo flashbacks is already dead. For this reason the film can present these images as a kind of portrait free of the forward propulsion of narrative and all that necessitates.
The rest of the film isn’t all bad; there are a few genuinely funny gags and the performance of Diana Gómez is endlessly charming. The issue is that the filmmakers don’t seem to like the characters populating the world of the film very much. These characters are two-dimensional and vapid; totally self-centered around their blogs. And while this may well be the point, the lack of juxtaposition to this stance leaves the characters adrift in their own meandering episodes.
At this point Faraday is probably best known as the movie where Ana de Armas wears a slave Leia costume in a comic book store. But Ana de Armas only appears for one shot in the entire film and is wholly inconsequential. Come for Ana de Armas and stay for Diana Gómez.
