One of the more notable aspects of this year’s Sundance Film Festival is the presence of two features from Brazil, Gustavo Pizzi’s “Loveling” and Aly Muritiba‘s “Rust.” It’s great to see more talent coming out of Brazil and making its way through the festival circuit, but unfortunately, this one fails to impress.
Premiering as a part of the World Cinema Dramatic Competition category, Muritiba’s “Rust” is a cautionary tale of teen trauma in the social media age. It explores the consequences of an obsessive digital life and image-based society. It’s a coming-of-age drama about a high schooler whose intimate video is exposed to the public. Now, while “Rust” is all of the above in nature, it really struggles to find its voice. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what this film wants to be.
In this regard, “Rust” is split into two nonsensical parts. What purpose this divide serves leaves me as perplexed as the next person. Nevertheless, Part One focuses on Tati (Tifanny Dopke), a high schooler who is tethered to her cell phone like any other teenager. Along the way, Tati quickly grows to like her classmate Renet (Giovanni de Lorenzi), but a brief time together results in her losing her phone. The next day, she unwillingly finds herself at the center of attention as a video of her having sex with her ex-boyfriend starts circulating among her peers and throughout the student body. Ridiculed and humiliated, Tati finds herself on the brink of self-destruction with her reputation drenched in complete turmoil as she becomes the target of misogyny and cyberbullying. Nonetheless, with the first part of “Rust,” viewers are left with an all-too-familiar script despite how poignant and necessary the film’s underlying message may be.
Part Two then abrasively shifts the viewers’ focus to the home life of the depressive and miserable Renet, who seems to have retracted into silence and isolation amid estranged family matters. With the Renet-focused storyline at hand, the theme of failure to functionally communicate face-to-face is expounded upon as he refuses to speak to his absent mother (Clarissa Kiste) and his equally reserved father/teacher (Pedro Inoue).
With this in mind, the narrative shift from Part One to Part Two is a jarring one at the very least. At first glance, “Rust” feels like a MTV-esque teen drama as it deals with the often-explored social commentary of cyber-bullying. The tone then shoots for art-house, slice-of-life drama in Part Two with no sense of purpose or payoff to this shift. I applaud Muritiba for attempting to spice up this banal teen-drama, but unfortunately, there’s no sense of direction to the experimental approach, resulting in a storyline that is unnecessarily convoluted yet insufferably predictable.
Aside from its redeeming quality of raising awareness about cyberbullying, “Rust” does have its occasional moments in keeping you invested in the characters and intrigued by camera work that cleverly directs the emotions of the audience. One moment that melds these two aspects in perfect unison is a lengthy, revealing conversation between Renet’s mother and father. This scene is shot entirely from the perspective of the backseat of their car, which adds to this genuinely intimate, fly-on-the-wall exchange of both remorse and endearing reminiscence of better times.
As nice as the above sounds, the devastating consequences in “Rust” never manage to maintain its grip once the emotional scope shifts away from the victim. There’s promise here, but Muritiba displays a shaky handling of mood and narrative. “Rust” is an extremely frustrating fusion (if you want to call it that) of family strife, unnecessary teenage drama and a tale of morality that can’t drive its message home. [D+]
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