Decline – 2011 LAFF

There’s no way something like writer/director Theo Court’s Decline would make it here in America. We’re all way too ADHD to handle a film with hardly any dialogue and long, static shots of an old man building a fire from kindling collected from the back yard of a rural, decrepit Chilean estate.

I include myself in this group. I’m used to writing on my laptop while periodically checking my email and Facebook with the TV on in the background. Basically, my brain needs constant stimulation from many different venues or else something feels gravely wrong. That sudden urge to check my phone even though it hadn’t beeped in hours. Even a slight panic for no good reason at all.

That’s exactly how I felt when Decline began, with its monochromatic landscape appearing almost like a black-and-white film and it’s long, languid shots of an elderly caretaker moving through his day with deliberate, methodical actions completely devoid of any sense of an impending deadline. It took some time for my brain to settle into this new world. Control-alt-delete. Clear the brain cache. Deep breaths.

Then something changed. The slow pacing went from being tedious to rhythmic. Watching the old man walk up a ladder to pick fruit from the nearly barren tree in the constantly foggy and overcast perma-afternoon light became mesmerizing. And, it all lead somewhere that I wasn’t at all expecting. And after the brief 80 minutes – which in the beginning felt like far longer – I was so glad that I had pushed my neurons to deal with the lack of stimuli. Otherwise, I might have missed out on seeing one of the most moving, purest forms of cinematic expression in quite some time.