In My Room (I) (2020) User Reviews

In My Room

[dansolo-20563 · 5/10 · 6 October 2020]

I didn't really like it to be honest. It was pretty unique, artistic, and personal, but that doesn't really mean it had all that much to it. Saying "it's hard dying alone" a few times does not automatically imbue a work with profundity. The cinematography was great, though. I especially liked the use of negative space, which went well thematically with what Maji was saying. Apart from that I just don't think there was all that much to this.

High 5

In My Room

[dmgrundy · 13 September 2020]

A COVID-19 lockdown film, it's hard to tell what this will look like at a different time. Diop turns the format-a commissioned film for a fashion brand-into a meditation on confinement, community and family, setting recordings of conversations with her late grandmother over lockdown diary-style footage of her own tower-block flat and its environs: shots of sunsets, flying birds, neighbours in their apartments at once as gestures to film (Rear Window, the use of natural landscape as corollary or contrast to human habitation and drama) at once resonant and desperately empty, the relentless force of loneliness in the recordings echoed in, commenting on and being commenting on by the footage, yet with a distance established so that the connection feels at once necessary and abstract, natural and forced.

Invasive

[knvixen · 1/10 · 2 October 2020]

It is very difficult to be objective in any review, and I know my state of mind has affected my viewing of this film. It was physically painful to listen to her grandmother's distress at the thought of having to leave her home. Seeing Mati then posturing as she mimed ridiculously to La Traviata in a quivering and exaggerated way that would destroy a singer's rendition disgusted me. I don't understand how anyone could use something so intensely personal in a way that exhibits deterioration and suffering. To do so in order to advertise Prada is amoral. I thought this might be a touching tribute, but to me it was revolting exploitation.