FightFuckPray

Directors:  Dan Bush, Christina Kline, Darren Mann

This film is done in three parts, Fight, Fuck, and Pray, each directed by a different director.  Fight follows Walker, Cass, and Ethan on Walker’s first day out of jail as they are determined to have a true boy’s night out.  Fuck follows Ethan’s newly-ex ex-fiancée Kate, a girl clearly in pain over her recently dissolved relationship in a way that causes her to make some unfortunate choices as she gets increasingly drunk in an attempt to forget.  Fuck also follows Ben, a shy, socially awkward hermit type whose cousin Ringo forces him out for a night on the town.  Pray follows the lonely, disturbing night of Rebecca who comes home to find her husband dead, but instead of reporting it, in her grief and shock she shaves him, dresses him, and props him up by the tree for their New Year’s Eve together. Eventually all three stories interconnect and intertwine with repercussions funny, touching, violent, and sad as the characters head towards the same New Year’s Eve party, which happens to be across the street from Rebecca’s house. 

The film is kept from being too slow or boring by pulling you back and forth between the stories.  The Fight story line is the weakest and the most annoying to watch in that the sound is bad, and nothing will take you out of a film faster than not being able to understand what the characters are saying to each other.  The characters and performances in the other two story lines are intriguing.  You feel their loneliness, their desperation.  In one scene where Ben is psyching himself up for the party he repeats the words over and over again in front of a mirror, “Hi. I’m Ben. I work in a fish store.”  The myriad of emotions he goes through repeating that one line sums up the pain of being lost, afraid, and uncertain about your life, who you are, where you are, and how you fit in.

The ending isn’t overwhelmingly satisfying and the connection between the Pray storyline and the others seemed a little forced, but it is an interesting experiment and character study.  Plus, the performances take on an added impressive quality when it is revealed that all the dialogue throughout was completely improvised.

Lucy Cruell