Film Details
Synopsis
Ever wondered what's happening in other cars whilst driving on busy streets? Sure, everyone's been busted picking their nose, singing along to AM radio or threatening to leave their kids at a truck stop before, but I'm talking about the milieu of human drama, people.
In 'Other Cars,' Alvarez weaves fractured moments across people's conversations and confrontations, his camera picking out scenes from different cars in a stream of traffic, all from the locked perspective of a backseat traveller. We listen in on an aging husband trying in vain for his wife to listen to him, parents irritated at children playing in the back seat and a car of youths debating where to get a hot dog; stories which remain separate, disparate, except for the coincidence of a shared road.
It's to Alvarez's credit that he avoids the movie which so easily could have been made here; a people-are-so-connected-but-they-don't even-realise-their-shared-humanity-and-inter-connectedness-until-it-starts-raining-frogs travesty in the wake of every second-rate Magnolia/Crash (actually, Crash was pretty second rate by itself) wannabe tapestry of human coincidence to bother dvd stores in the last ten years. Instead, he seems to be taking influence more from Richard Linklater here; a kind of Slacker-on-wheels approach that breaks its tiny points of drama into discrete, human moments and keeps them there.
The car perspective keeps emphasizing the audience's role as voyeur, and it's a deft feat of production that Alvarez brings his stories from the distance, into the spotlight, and keeps them whizzing past as the cars criss cross and overtake out of sight
Other Cars was clearly driven (you didn't think we were going to do a Road Movie showcase without quality punning like that, right?) by Alverez, who not only acted as director here, but also wrote the screenplay, acted as director of photography and edited the production. His film is an intelligent work, deceptively simple in the moments it observes. Subtle and intricate, he gives us something more to think about next time we find ourselves daydreaming in the back seat.
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