'The Story of Looking' Peers No Further Than One Man's Self-Indulgent Purview [Telluride Review]

The logical conclusion of one man’s perpetual quest to make sure the world is never robbed of even one of his precious thoughts, “The Story of Looking” is little more than a polished vlog. Mixing (literal) naked introspection with his usual one-man-show movie philosophizing, director/narrator/subject/center of the universe, Mark Cousins, explores the concept of “looking” in both the physical and the spiritual sense. This exploration rarely leaves room for anything except Mark, though, and much like his “The Story of Film” installments, it acts as little more than a platform for one person’s free-form epiphanies.

The conceit of the documentary is born out of a very real dilemma Cousins is experiencing in the opening minutes of the piece. Lying shirtless in bed, Cousins speaks into his camera about the following day’s operation to remove a cataract in his left eye: a procedure that could lead to (or correct) permanent loss of vision. Cousins explains that he wants to spend what might be his last day of full vision exploring what it means to see and look, examining the ways light, color, nature, history, art, and other visual stimuli inform his worldview.

Conceptually earnest though it may be, there isn’t much structural cohesion to the piece. Much of “The Story of Looking” consists of long, uncut stretches of Cousins laying in bed, holding court for the audience with all the production value of a dorm room Facebook Live broadcast. Although the doc mixes in video of the outside world along with still frames of notable landmarks and naturescapes, for a documentary exploring the majesty of sight, there’s little visual flair to be found. At one point, Cousins spends roughly 5 minutes in bed reading tweets aloud, withholding any kind of visual flourish to bring the moment alive (on-screen text, user profiles, deliberate interior lighting set-ups, etc…).

The moment is indicative of a pervasive laziness that runs through the center of the effort. Cousins, who doesn’t even bother to get out of bed for much of the doc, relies on a scattershot mix of childhood memories, his usual cinematic introspection, and everyday observation to cobble together something resembling structure for the doc. Bouncing between several different thematic guardrails, he never quite settles on whether his personal history (and future?) with sight, his cinematic observational lens, or his response to the larger world’s understanding of “looking” will lead the way.

The result is a sort of free-jazz style of filmmaking where one notion or epiphany floats casually into the next, with no hope of knowing where it might go from there (and little to connect it to what came before). Cousins never speaks to anyone with a similar macular degeneration condition to get their perspective, or a person(s) with visual impairment issues, keeping the focus entirely on himself. There is a clip of Ray Charles giving an interview at the beginning of the piece, talking to Dick Cavett about his blindness and asserting that he wouldn’t have his eyesight restored even if that was an option, yet this is the closest Cousins or the doc ever comes to critically engaging the central issue outside of one man’s purview.

Many people live with diminished sight or none at all, yet aside from one recollection about a woman Cousins once met with color-blindness, visually impaired experiences of “looking” are never given any real consideration (and none at all outside of Cousins’ telling of things). There’s mention at one point of the “lockdown,” which explains some of this isolated claustrophobia and lack of outside context, yet 2021 offerings like Bo Burnham’s “Inside” and Taylor Garron and Chanel James’ “As of Yet” are proof that such restrictions aren’t a cinematic death sentence. Cousins never flirts with anything resembling this level of creativity, relying instead on his own uninterrupted train of thought to lead the audience towards some kind of revelation.

Unfortunately, there isn’t one. Cousins drifts through “The Story of Looking” like a man being paid by the hour to spin half-assed revelations for an audience of one, falling back on his “Story of Film” meditations to fill the gaps (or maybe just use up some deleted scenes that didn’t make it into his most recent 140-minute documentary, also released this year). It’s a plodding, indulgent, unfocused mess that informs the audience about nothing in the world with the exception of Mark Cousins himself. By the end of it, one hopes that Cousins does indeed get his eyesight restored, though it might be better served if it took his voice in exchange, if only for a bit. [F]

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