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Stuck in the middle with you: Romania's Elevator premieres at South East European Film Festival
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Two characters in search of an exit. . .
One elevator. Two people. That's it.
Like a road movie without a road, a car, or even a doorhandle with which to get out, Elevator takes us on an 85 minute ride getting to know two people by the way they interact with one another within the confines of a very, very small space. Reportedly made for a fraction of a fraction of what it cost to make The Blair Witch Project--three hundred dollars (+ meals, I hope)--the film looks and feels as polished as any of those indie darlings that rain down on Sundance every year. Directed by former Navy sailor and "self-taught," first-time filmmaker, George Dorobantu, the film avoids the soul-searching pitfalls of similarly space-challenged plots, making Elevator more akin to Vicenzo Natali's Cube (or for that matter, the Twilight Zone's "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" episode that inspired Cube), then to, oh, let's say (just off the top of my head), Hitchcock's Lifeboat. Just as with Cube and Five Characters, our two protagonists in Elevator are much more preoccupied with figuring out how to get out of their present situation alive than with getting to know each other.
As if suspended in an eternal purgatory, with no way of ascending or descending, Elevator's two young characters, simply credited as The Boy and The Girl, are stuck in a repetitive Sisyphean plight reminiscent of the one taken by two other road-less travelers and nondescript characters, The Driver and The Mechanic, from Monte Hellman's equally purgatorial road flick, Two-Lane Blacktop. Except, where those two laconic drifters hardly acknowledge their lot in life, much less each other, the two characters stuck in the elevator argue about how to escape from their predicament and about each other's behavior under the duress. As obnoxious as that might sound, the clash underlies the reality of such a situation, intensifying expectations as days pass (the fast-forward effect used to show the passing of time being the movie's only faux pas, betraying its otherwise minimalistic aesthetic) and one wonders what will do them in first: hunger, thirst, lack of oxygen, each other? Ultimately, like an '80s slasher flick, Elevator has a moral ax to grind, but not before reminding us that not all movie villains are the kind that conceal their faces while sashaying around with a machete. In Two-Lane Blacktop, Hellman shot over 200 different angles of the interior of the movie's '55 Chevy with the purpose of depicting it as one of the movie's central characters. With perhaps not as many camera angles of Elevator's 10-by-13 feet setting, I, nonetheless, find it difficult to not think of the metal lift as the movie's living, breathing antagonist.
When all is said and done, Elevator is whatever you make of it, an almost tabula rasa of cultural (pop or otherwise) commentary. What's certain, however, is that with a thunderous BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! at the doors of Cinema, the arrival of George Dorobantu has been announced. Film students, aspiring filmmakers, cinema lovers: take note.
Elevator will be making its Los Angeles premiere during the closing night of the 4th Annual South East European Film Festival (April 30-May 4) at the Goethe Institut and UCLA's James Bridges Theatre.
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