Orange Drive

This short film tells the story of a young man who hangs out with friends, falls in love, falls out of love, has an affair, loses his job, gets into trouble with the police, narrowly escapes serious injury, buys some music and more. It tells us this story in less than 10 minutes and it does it with the action pretty much never leaving the guy's car.

The plot summary sounds ambitious for sure, and it will make you wonder how very half-assed it is going to have to do all these things in order to deliver them all in the time with no flex for development or finesse. This was not so much a concern for me because I went into the film with no knowledge but what did concern me is that very quickly I did not care for the people or the place. As someone lucky enough to grow up outside of poverty and with sufficient resources and opportunities, I do rankle a bit at characters in the same situation just hanging around and being cool etc, so the thought that this would be a film about a load of annoying "dude" teenagers in LA hanging out joking put me on edge. This feeling maybe lasted a minute, I didn't know because I didn't really noticed when it stopped, but it did stop.

What replaced it was a sense of caring about the character and his life, the wrong decisions, the right ones, the pain, the love and so on. It was delivered very naturally and in a way that makes sense but is also very clever and creative. To deal with the "all this in 10 minutes" thing, the film is delivered in 5-10 seconds long snippets all of which are filmed from a camera fixed to the bonnet of the guy's car in one static shot. So while the place never changes we jump through months (a year?) in time and also we change places in terms of where his life is. It does it very well and it makes the difficult look very easy, although it is difficult.

The snippets don't feel rushed even though they are rapid; they also add something pretty much each time – maybe not as an individual snippet, but in the wider context it fits together really well. It has a natural flow and it has a pretty natural and honest story to tell – one helped by the performances being convincing and natural throughout. I started out prepared to hate it for the people and the rushed, grabbed snippets but in fact it worked really well as just a grab sample of life as it occurs in this car and it made it look easy. A cleverly structured and delivered short film from Mark Lester – I enjoyed it a great deal.