“Fate’s Shadow” (2019) Short Film Review
Writer/director/star Michelle Arthur imbues the ten minute run time of "Fate's Shadow" with melodrama, loneliness and desperation. It's a one-way mirror into the demise of a relationship. A well off and cultured older woman is preening and readying herself for a glamorous date at the Opera. While she's out for a run, her flakey beau cancels their date - it seems - he's got a better offer. While she attends the Opera, she processes the signs of the inevitable demise of her relationship with layers of superstitious meaning.
"Fate's Shadow" has the aesthetic of a 90s, suburban, glamour shoot, overexposed and flattering to take the edges off of the frugal production budget. The staging of this exclusive Opera begs your imagination to entangle and amplify this meagre rendering into its full glory in your mind.
"Fate's Shadow" revelations aren't in its beliefs or its rational choices. Instead, its harsh truths of ageing disgracefully, regressing to roadside screeching tantrums and the most easily sold fortunes when faced with the reality. One hopes that with time and mileage, you're sharpening your emotional intelligence. The romance of youth is the permission to exhibit naiveté- believing that loves won and lost are galaxy altering events. "Fate's Shadow" needs a bucket of iced water. This is a projection of the world as Mills and Boon would prescribe it, and a woman who should be wiser curbing reality.
"Fate's Shadow" didn't resonate with on an emotional or a technical level (which to be fair is exceedingly tricky in shorts). One can be sure that this level of dissociative bourgeois blow-up is not my kind of b*llshit.
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfUzSrYTFK8&w=854&h=480]
