Generation Well
Sometimes it almost looks like Serra gives preferential treatment toward the difficult choice. And that’s why it works.
There’s something admirable about art that doesn’t always take the easy way out. The best art is often complicated and difficult to fully parse on a first experience. They are messy, dirty even. Generation Well, a bold 18-minute short directed by Jack Serra that successfully juggles more than a handful of heavy themes and plays fast and loose with time and memory, takes no shortcuts. Sometimes it almost looks like Serra gives preferential treatment toward the difficult choice. And that’s why it works.
Stevie (Carly Tatiana Pandža) is down on her luck with a mysterious run-in with the law. She has a drug problem, her husband leaves her, and she begins obsessing over a cop who looks like her dead dad. The timelines play overtop of each other and what’s a memory in one timeline becomes a projection into the present in another. Editors Fernando Broce and Jack Serra favor a persistent chaotic tone over continuity. Less careful viewers may even find themselves lost in the fragmented memories and overlapping timelines. It’s not unlike a music video in the rejection of traditional verisimilitude.
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