"Questions in a World of Blue". Magdalen auditorium

Ciana Russo is a student of English Literature, and with her first film Questions in a World of Blue she’s created what is effectively a snapshot of visual poetry: an Ode on a Passing Boy.

Two girls sit in a coffee shop, encaged in black and white, chatting somewhat pretentiously and snobbishly about the humdrum lives of the people they see around them. A boy walks past the window, and for one of the girls, the world turns to colour. She constructs a love story around this fleeting glimpse. Androgynous and irresistible, his life dances before her in swathes of paint, flowers, images imposed upon images…. until he’s gone, and the world is once again in monochrome.

What a neat, lovely, little daydream, and the ideal subject for a 12-minute short.

The concept driving Questions in a World of Blue is the idea of the ‘female gaze’, the antithesis of the ‘male gaze’ identified by Laura Mulvey to describe the depressingly still-rampant objectification of women in the media. But I’m not sure that gazing at/objectifying men achieves much beyond some minor tit-for-tat one-upmanship. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I felt that the female viewpoint of the film fell into the same trap usually reserved for male perspectives.

Having said that, the fact that the scene ultimately returns to black and white does suggest that our two gazers are still in their cage, and the filmmaker may be implying that to establish a true female gaze they’ll need to do more than fantasise about romantic love.

The central, ‘blue’ section could be criticised for conventionality: teenage love poems, daisies, happy afternoons spent painting your beloved’s portrait. Are these presented as truly utopian or ultimately shallow? Is the self-conscious intellectualising and pretty-boy poshness being undermined, or is it just the world our characters live in? I am not sure, and a clearer intention would help drive the film’s point home.

Ultimately I found this a poignant piece and a quietly confident first film. One of the characters jokes that a passer-by is ‘desperately trying to seem interesting without actually being it’. The film just needs to decide whether it approves of or derides that attitude.

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