Violet Heights

Richard Bevis returns to 3DMM a little over a year and a half since his last movie, and what a great way to come back. We're not very far in yet, but this is the best movie of 2008 so far.

Bevis has shown a remarkable eye for art design in his previous movies, particularly Dance of the Firefly, but nothing stands out quite as much as this one. He opens with a surprisingly powerful logo and then toys with lines, curves, borders, and symbols in the opening titles, a motif that repeats throughout the film. It's a rare skill, and he pulls it off extremely well (although the default grey text for the title itself is disappointingly bland amidst some truly excellent design work). Like Firefly and Fly to a lesser degree, he uses bright, saturated colors for both backgrounds and highlights, and it brings the film's canvas to life in a way that most 3DMM movies don't quite achieve. Using this many different hues, it could've easily looked like a clown threw up on the canvas, but he controls it well. After HMC, I'd say that Bevis is the best color person currently active in the community.

As we move from titles to establishing shots, the purple line work lingers, becoming sort of a polaroid-frame border. At times this does create some bizarre angles, overlapping the horizontals and verticals of his scenery, but for the most part it keeps up a visual look that is unique in 3DMM movies. The purple border is an additional layer of detail in a movie already rich in sharp lines and bright colors, so it runs the risk of becoming visually noisy in some more complicated scenes.

This pretty well sums up what Violet Heights is: a distinctive movie with impressive detail marks and symbols that occasionally overreaches, into the realm of clutter. The narrative mirrors Bevis's design ideas uncannily. We open with a man lying dead at his desk from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The color sections are set in the present, where the story is already over: all that's left to show is pans and zooms of the environment, and Bevis uses these to establish a mood and remind us for the context of his real story, which is sepia-toned and plays in reverse. The gun jumps into the man's hand and sucks the bullet out of his brain. He puts it down, pulls a photograph out of a drawer, and walks backwards out of the house to a hospital. We cut back to his body as needed to reinforce the consequences of this story, and there are visual motifs like the photograph and a bridge which come in at points throughout. It's wonderfully done for the most part.

In the last few moments, though, I started to lose track of what Bevis was trying to tell me, though. The first two minutes are masterful, setting a mood, establishing visual cues and motifs, and unveiling the story at a fluid pace, and from the moment we see the park bench, it was unclear what was happening. Either the chronology abruptly jumped backwards (an unwise move during a film that already uses chronology in two different ways) or the same actor was used for two different characters. The final shot of the photograph looked beautiful, but after the 20 or 30 seconds of confusion over what I was being told, it didn't give me the closure it needed to. I'm sure that Bevis will be able to give me the story specifics, but in a movie that does visual storytelling so well up to this point, it's a shame it didn't bridge the final set of revelations in a coherent way.

Regardless, it's visually distinctive and one of the most interesting releases in recent memory -- it's an easy pick for Best Movie of 2008 and deserves a lot more feedback than it's getting. It doesn't quite come together in the way that it should considering the emotional power of the first two minutes, but I'm glad it was made. Nice work.

Critical Score: 79/100.
Personal Score: 89/100.

[Richard Bevis]

Thanks Aaron that was great - your reviews are always the most useful feedback I receive.