The Hours of the Day (15)

Directed by Jaime Rosales, Written by Jaime Rosales and Enric Rufas
Screening at FACT from 10th - 12th September 2004

Reviewed by Adam Ford

Ok then, here goes. There's this really boring Spanish guy called Abel (Alex Brendemühl). He's got a boring job selling boring clothes to boring people. He has boring friends and a bored girlfriend. He might go on holiday, he might not. He might move house, he might not. He may even get married, but he just needs a bit more time to decide. Oh, and he kills a couple of strangers out of the blue (presumably to relieve the boredom) and no more is said about either. That's it.

The sheer agonies of surviving through this nonentity have to be experienced to be believed. At the end, the audience burst into gales of laughter, collectively coming to the realisation that we had sat on the excruciatingly uncomfortable seats of The Box for what seemed like an eternity and waded our way through scene after interminable scene for absolutely no payoff.

"What the hell is the point?", a girl asked on her way out. The point was that there was no point. The punchline was the lack of a punchline. Some might call it ‘postmodernism’, but I call it vacuous rubbish.