Lambent Fuse. I'm not entirely sure what to say about the film, seeing as much of anything might dip too far into spoilers and we don't want any of that.
Lambent Fuse is a film that is best summed as a series of vignettes in a 90 minute format. It follows six characters over the course of a few months and touches on many of their personal problems from depression to kleptomania. There, you have the frame work for the film, that's truly about everything I can say about the film without feeling like I'm ruining a film that really needs to be seen to understand.
I was lucky enough to see this film at a local film festival this fall, being one in the first audience to see a project the Matt Cici had been working on almost the entire time I've known him, if not all of it. I went in wanting to hate it, because I knew that any preconceived notions I had about Matt prior to seeing it were going to paint it in a different light and make me bias. And while there are some story structure issues or "hero's journey" elements I believe are either flawed or missing, I loved this film. It's not the same film I would have made had I wanted to cover the same subject matter, but that's because it had a completely different person with a completely different vision creating it. That's awesome.
Having seen some other smaller projects Matt has worked on and knowing him on a personal basis in college, I watched Lambent Fuse through a different lens. Many of the camera angles, the timing, the establishing shots or even the extra second the camera would rest on an expression or prop screamed Matt Cici's vision. The psychological prospective of Freddie and Paul on the screen through filming and editing effects helped to carry their point in the film home. Dan Eckman-Thomas' scenes helping to break up most of the film's melancholy and make me laugh during what is a fairly dark film. The fact that the filming of the entire project was done in ten days and it still comes across with a unified vision. Gold stars all around.
The pacing of the film is great, I never wanted to look at my watch. The casting is pretty good, one or two of the actors I wasn't particularly loving, but that's a subjective matter. As I vaguely mentioned before, there isn't a strong heroic character in this film and to be honest, it's a pretty ambitious choice to make. And maybe that's a strong enough element that you won't like this film, having no one likable to root for and just watching characters plucked out of real life, making real decisions and not the self-sacrificing characters that would jump in front of a bullet aimed at your foot.
I don't really know what more I can say, well there is plenty I would like to say, but I honestly feel that this film is worth the cost of admission. It may even need a second viewing to catch all the stuff going on, and not because it's confusing, it's actually pretty dense and I'd be surprised if anyone would catch everything that's going on and how everything it linked together in a first viewing.
