Small town lights Because nothing ever lives and no one ever really dies – Cody Foster
The sheriff is working as a school coach or vice versa, who knows? The main event is the football team games, and they are the only real life in them - as long as you are a quarterback or any other important person in the team seems to be still ahead of you, everyone says hello to you and puts their hopes on you, feeding your fatal self-confidence. But as soon as the final exams are over, it turns out that there is nothing next, even if you are a good player, and even if you are not lucky here. In any case, you continue your life as an uncouth drunkard, spending life in a bar, discussing new promising young people, who are probably waiting for the same unenviable fate, despite all the resistance. For a girl, the only point is to dance in a support group and wear a branded school jacket in the cold. Do you recognize the portrait? That's right, a conservative American town somewhere in Ohio, a favorite type of setting for high school sports movies, is the only place that gives it such global citywide significance. David Sabbat chooses just such a scene for his picture, changes football to basketball, but at the same time risks adding another event, for the time being justly remaining a mystery, which radically changes the whole essence of the picture.
For David, “Frozen in Time” debut – he started with commercials, continued with short films, and now proudly calls himself a storyteller, having completed his first feature work, which he shot on one of the eight scripts he wrote, choosing it as the most easily realized. He begins very statically, showing the city, which on the one hand is as simple as coffee in the morning, and on the other hand there are often not just and very melodramatically distorted fates. Lost in their bravado teenagers and lost in their lives the older generation. Neither good nor bad, especially given the strange style that Sabbat chooses for himself - a kind of youth series of the mid-to-late nineties, when important issues began to be touched, but the prevailing trend was still clumsy melodrama. The director repeats this organization of space on the screen both eventually and visually – if you didn’t know that the picture was shot in 2011, you would think that it happened a decade ago. However, after some rather long time, suddenly, the Sabbat turns everything upside down, announcing a traumatic event, after which this city, or even the village, to be exact, will never be the same again. Here, that amateurish style suddenly transforms into a world with elements of Stephen King, whom the director mentioned in one of his few interviews, in places begins to resemble Lynch, to whom Sabbath also refers, only this time on the screen, and even sometimes Atom Egoyan’s Glorious Future, exploring the reaction to exactly the same event.
However, it cannot be said that the interesting style with a touch of mysticism, into which the picture is transformed as a result, can completely cover the content of the work, which includes a lot of questions and a lot of answers, but misses something that lies between these two hypostases. It may be hard to believe that this can happen, but Sabbot’s painting is too simple and too complex at the same time. He has a subtle and clever fantasy metaphor about grief, in which he literally perceives that life in a small town stops, especially after this kind of loss. Ignoring pain becomes an unwritten rule, and the only survivor is the one you can recoup. The quota of deaths is closed at a time for many years to come - now this piece of land is the perfect place without disease and trouble. The worst has already happened. These are really virtuoso observations, for a beginner who has a bit of money and support at his disposal, and who doesn’t take the tracing off of his own experience. But in the end, his desire for King and Lynch, the desire to dilute pure drama ruins the case - a style that he chose does not perceive the heroes of the flippers, wigs and chases, even if they are fat-free from any action. Therefore, in the end, there is no “Glorious Future”, no drama about school sports and a small city like “Friday Night Lights”, but only, albeit interesting, but not yet established style with very dubious elements.