CAMERA SHY literally follows a local politician who is about to enter national politics by selling out to support a developer who wants to construct a Casino on a toxic dump site. He suddenly notices a cameraman filming him whenever he has to make an ethical choice, but no one else can see the camera, and this brings about a ton a unexpected, hilarious but also dark consequences.
This Charlie Kaufmanesque comedy not only begins with a brilliant high concept premise, but keeps on topping it with how that premise is mined. It nails almost every comedic gag, and as a result it is uproariously funny. The dialogue is witty, and the movie keeps on going into unexpected directions. The actor who plays the protagonist strikes just the right balance between endearing naivete and blundering duplicity. And to top it all, the entire subject matter of corrupt politicians manipulated by the rich and powerful, one that could scarcely be more topical yet is not that often encountered in film, is explored in a profoundly philosophical manner.
The film seems like a perfect example of meta-modernism, a relatively recent movement in the arts and in philosophy that has been claimed to take the place of post-modernism, itself a successor to modernism. Modernism is characterized by certain narratives based on definite and largely unquestioned acceptance of certain values, albeit values which replace those of classicism, modernism's predecessor. The problem is that sometimes these narratives turn out to be problematic or may be misused for self-serving ends. Post-modernism questions these narratives by "deconstructing" them. The problem with post-modernism is that whatever the deconstruction results in is itself a narrative, so it becomes ultimately self-defeating. Meta-modernism in a sense combines elements of these, or has sometimes also been described as "oscillating" between a modernist and post-modernist narrative. CAMERA SHY takes a familiar modernist narrative, a corrupt politician trying to abuse the system for his own advantage, but then "deconstructs" it through the absurd device of the lens of the camera only visible to the protagonist (and through which we get to watch him). However, toward the end, the narrative quite self-consciously converges back to a modernist narrative of a movie in which everything falls in place, so to say.
I can hardly believe that more than 10 years after this movie has come out, I am the first person to write a review of this on IMdB. This has to be the most underrated movie ever. The mind-bending originality and nearly flawless execution of this film renders this among the very best that indie cinema, or for that matter, any cinema can offer.
This is one of those movies you should see before you die, and I do not say this about very many films.
