Everyone is looking for inspiration. Especially artists. But what happens when this inspiration becomes such an insistent voice in your head that it drives you crazy? ‘The Writer‘ is an excellent short film exploring the unseen nuances of this artistic impulse that is no longer perceived from a romantic perspective, but from a pathological one. In fact, Hugo Pinto tries through his experimental project to penetrate the intimacy of such a pathology via the multiple layers of a conjugal relationship, in order to illustrate not only the conflict between the protagonist and her own ‘demon’, but also between the pride of partners while seeking salvation in writing. The artistic act becomes, from this point of view, both a blessing and a curse, a way of self-redemption and an insidious mechanism of self-destruction. These paradoxical connections are filtered by the perception of an intelligent director who, starting from the aspects that define the so-called hypergraphy (inability to stop writing), analyses the anatomy of a relationship gradually destroyed by the impossibility or selfishness of the two partners to break away from the perfidious aura of literature. More precisely, the two partners are built in total opposition: for her writing is a neurotic act, the pure manifestation of an inexplicable suffering, while for him, writing is an aspiration, an inaccessible dream.
Everything happens in a permanent fluctuation between reality and fiction, between the omniscient perspective of a narrator who both writes and lives her own life and the domestic scenes, between the everyday realism of married life and the poetic hypostases of the soul tormented by the burden of insatiable creation. The text slowly slides towards the meta-text, while the characters become not only the actors of their own existence, but also the invented presences of their own fictions. Their life is a fiction, to the same extent that the fiction they write ends up replacing their existence. This difficult game of perspectives is manipulated with an extraordinary artistic sense by Hugo Pinto that pushes the structure of his short film towards the formula of a neurotic cinematic poem. Thus, the slowness and tenderness of the intimate scenes between the two partners is obsessively “pierced” by visceral materializations of the female character’s psyche, the galloping progress towards madness is fractured by narrative interventions that organize the cinematic substance in chapters, while all this inner and exterior chaos is supported by the work of some extremely talented actors. Perhaps the biggest flaw of this project is that its entire complexity is not completely explored. That is why we are extremely eager to see what ‘The Writer’ will look like in its feature film version, which will surely take the intensity of this cinematic poem to an even more refined level.
For the suggestiveness with which it depicts the feverish state of a strange pathology, for the courage and talent with which the director manipulates impactful experimental stylistic strategies and for the intensity of the work of actors whose “personas” find in art the supreme way of living but also a deceitful form of self-flagellation, ‘The Writer’ was awarded with the 2nd Film of the Month distinction in the July 2020 edition of TMFF.
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