When the first modern locomotives were patented and built in the late 18th century, the radical change it brought to everyday life is almost unimaginable to a today’s human. But its impact went far beyond providing a life-changing commodity: it opened a new chapter in our perception of speed and time-space. While on a railroad, one was able to experience the disruption of Bakhtin´s chronotope, to disconnect from the temporal dimension of their reality by watching the space rapidly and continuosly transform before their eyes. After the locomotive, the next biggest transformation mankind underwent was with the discovery of telephone: now the spacial dimension could be overcome as the temporal synchronism was achieved. Instead of relying on eyes and picture processing, our ears and cognitive, linguistic processing turned into our way of being present.
This infernal simultaneity, to use the famous Miroslav Krleža’s syntagm, was the basis for the “Last Call,” an indie drama from 2019 by Gavin Michael Booth. The movie follows a late-night phone conversation between Beth (played by Sarah Booth), a school janitor and a single mother of two, and Scott (played by Daved Wilkins), a middle-aged alcoholic who’s about to commit suicide. After trying to call a suicide helpline, he’s mistakenly connected to Beth’s workplace. During their conversation we, together with Beth, get to know Scott’s life story. We understand that Scott’s depression is mainly caused by the guilt of losing his son in a car accident and him coming face-to-face with the idea of the absurdity of life and death.
The picture is broken into two frames, each showing two contrasted settings where two different color palettes prevail. On the one hand, in Beth’s surroundings the colors that predominate are cold blue with bright, almost neon red lights, whereas Scott’s apartment has more of earthly, dull and musty tones to it, in accordance with his dark and lifeless mood. Given the nature of the film, the focus is put on verbal and non-verbal communication which means that the acting was crucial here: and it was excellent. In the non-verbal context, the role and importance of concentration when it comes to the dichotomy egoism-altruism is brought to the fore when Beth has two phone calls at once: besides Scott, she’s talking about wheather one of her sons has returned home, which eventually leads to her endangering the conversation with Scott. She maintains two phone calls at the same time more than once, when she struggles to deal with the pressure to help Scott.
Other dichotomies are also noticeable in the film such as coincidence-destiny and profundity-triviality. The coincidence-destiny is mirrored in the core basis of the film: their conversation is enabled by coincidence. At one point, however, Scott declares the following: “I’ve made the deal with the Universe… Call the helpline… If they can talk me out of it… I’d say the Universe has made itself perfectly clear,” which is where the whole principle of predestination lies. The other dualism, the one that exists between profundity and triviality, actually becomes obvious when the call abruptly ends because Scott’s telephone cord was accidentally unplugged, whilst Beth was afraid that he was going to attempt suicide. This opposition is also visible between those few humoristic situations from the beginning and the sad and pessimistic ending we see later on. In the beginning the comedy effect is grounded on the misunderstaning: Scott is naturally convinced that he’s talking to someone from the helpline, and Beth, completely oblivious to it, offers to take and pass his message to college staff the next day.
The eschatological moment is also quite memorable: in one instance, Scott talks about what he believes happens when we die. He makes a reference to Einstein and the idea that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, therefore he draws the conclusion that after we die, we only get transformed into energy, and makes as well a remark that he doesn’t believe in hell. In fact, if we examine Scott’s attitude towards these questions, we can clearly notice the paradox. On the one hand, he wants to believe in predestination as seen from his words quoted above, but at the same time he rejects other Christian concepts: hell, “god works in mysterious ways,” etcetera. He bends and distorts the narrative so that its most prominent elements are the ones that are most destructive to himself, quite common in an irrational state of mind drained by suffering from guilt.
Click here to watch the trailer from “Last Call”
Another aspect of the film that caught my attention was the music, which was exceptional. It suits the mood and adds the right amount of the ordinarity of day-to-day life to the film. The breezy song from the beginning, for example, sets the overall bittersweet tone to this excerpt from life filled with laughter, worries, occasional wonderings about the meaning of life and death, rumination, work. It contributes to what I call the poetisation of reality, the effect of seeing something ordinary in a work of art and thus perceiving it beautiful. I was not, therefore, surprised that the production company behind it, is called Mimetic Entertainment.
** ”Last Call” is currently doing the festival circuit. It will be available soon on VOD.
