Actress and singer/songwriter Noémie Merlant delivered a brilliant performance under Céline Sciamma' fantastic direction in 'portrait of a lady on fire. Since the success of 'portrait of a lady on fire' she has gained a huge following, largely consisting of "stans". I hate "stan culture". I find it pretty sad and pathetic, you can be a fan of something or someone without obsessing over it/them. "Stan culture" can also be unhealthy. I'll use people as an example as it's easier to explain. If you like Ariana Grande you don't have to obsess over her to the point where you want to be her and you begin to lose your sense of self and individuality as a result of being a Ariana Grande "stan". An extremely common byproduct of being a "stan" is trying to look like said celebrity. Looking like someone who's rich and famous and living the best life you can imagine doesn't give you their life, you're still just... you... wasting your life. I know I sound like a baby boomer right now but stuff like this is so stupid to me, the worst part is that I understand why people do it, why they are attracted to that culture and why I hate that millions of people do it.
Now I will assume my just as cynical internet persona.
Nothing is good about this film, Merlant is far too ambitious considering her ability, she has one good performance, and it is a brilliant performance, but I'm willing to bet that the only performance a large majority of her fanbase has seen is her performance in portrait of a lady on fire. Watch Curiosa or Le retour du héros and you'll see how bad she is under a bad director.
The direction in Shakira is as bad, the actors look confused and the line delivery is bad on every line, after seeing this Merlant absolutely should have re-shot at least some of these scenes. To give her some credit though I think the performances are beyond terrible and couldn't be fixed by re-shooting the entire short.
Everything about this project feels rushed, the actors are bad, scout for longer, find better actors, find better scouts. The tone is way too serious, I'm supposed to care about Shakira from the second the film starts, but she has no character, then I'm supposed to care about her at the end... and she has the same amount of character. The story is complete trash too, again it feels rushed and is somehow made so insanely unbelievable that you can't help but laugh. It's not like it's a very unrealistic story either, this kind of thing happens all the time, I think it comes down to the way the events are presented, which is awful.
The screenplay is probably the worst thing about Shakira but it's hard to narrow down. The only thing that makes sense is the character motivations which was really surprising considering that the rest of the film makes about as much sense as Noémie Merlant making a competent movie.
The dialogue is also really poor. Good dialogue is more nuanced than just the purpose it serves, the dialogue in Shakira is unnatural, inauthentic and lacks subtext. Something that can make good dialogue great. If you don't know what subtext is, It's basically what a character says, versus what a character means. Obviously not all good dialogue has layers and layers of subtext, but it absolutely helps.
I usually talk in moderate depth about the musical scores of the films I review, but no score is used here. I admire this actually, a few filmmakers I think are great don't use a musical score for they're films. In this film having music would have soffend the already lackluster climax. Instead of music we get stock background ambiance.
Shakira lacks any passion, any heart, any soul. It's hard to care about something that nobody else cares about, not even the filmmakers. This becomes painstakingly obvious when you see the abomination that is the final product.
