Lily & Kat (2015)

Too much of everything

A Disappointing Continuation

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The only thing I liked about this movie was the music and some of the pictures. Standing pictures. The whole concept of the movie is based on the situation between those girls. Lily isn't really played by a strong actress, so the opposition to Kat has completely failed. The storyline itself is not exciting, not gripping, not very meaningful. It is a story about girls in the beginning of their twens. From my own experience I can say, that they are barely adults and that is what dominates this movie. Unrational, childish behavior. And how this plays out over the whole picture, and how it is made and woven is, subsequently observed, very poor. I would have liked the movie without the conversations and without the video. Just the music and some art-like looking stills. That would have been enough. No ground breaker, no beautiful background or relationships. Just poor judgment, despair and a little failure. Do we really need that in a medium, that is kinda supposed to let us escape from that darned reality? I almost couldn't stand it till the end. But I wanted to see, if at least that was somehow resolving or meaningful. But it wasn't. A total waste of time.

Two Girls. One, an artiste, the other a hedonist. There are best friends. Lily is American, Kat is British. Lily finds out Kat is moving to London. She's not happy. Lily also hates her job. Her cheating boyfriend.And apparently, life in general. Kat just pops some pills. Gets drunk. And sleeps with everyone who has a pulse. They have a threesome with a graphic designer. Don't worry, kids... The lights go out before things get TOO raunchy. So, the only possibly good scene in the film... RUINED.I didn't care about any of these people. Their tawdry lives. Their insignificant worries. Their non-existent development. Worst of all were the scenes where Lily talks to a fictitious psychiatrist in her head... I haven't heard such a bunch of fortune cookie psychobabble masquerading as useful advice in all my life. A complete waste of time then. Do drive home safely. 4/10

It's the first movie I saw that takes a very strong position against what everyone else is hyping: the emptiness of over-sexualized, pretty and nevertheless un-inspired women. Almost every scene seems to try to put forward some form of eroticism that the actresses realistically show. But contrary to common movies, this movies does not make it pretty, nothing happens and truthfully nobody cares. It is re-definition of what it means to be pretty, over-sexualized and again .. uninspired.I mean, there is nothing that should turn the viewer off. The dresses are elegant, the women appear funny and are certainly looking pretty. But there is simply no magic in their lives anywhere. They are plain boring and it is a paid to imagine having to live with any person in this movie for longer than 10 seconds. So I think the movie is artistic in some respect.

Saw it at TIFF New Wave.I have to be honest: Lily & Kat was a steaming pile of dung and there's no point pretending otherwise. I felt a frisson of joy when it ended at the anticipated moment because I had been alternately nauseated, bored and disgusted for what seemed much longer than 89 minutes, and, while the ending was predictable, there was the tiniest chance that the director might have cut back to yet another chaotic, meaningless, self-indulgent scene.Nauseated because it was filmed entirely in hand-held shaky-cam, so that even scenes that were intended to be close, contemplative and meaningful were punctuated with a vomit-inducing twitch every half second or so. I can only hope that the director was traumatized by a camera dolly as a youth and subsequently developed a mortal fear of the things because the only obvious alternative would be that this was a conscious decision arising out of some cracked, sophomoric "artistic vision".Disgusting for its unabashed idolatry of youth as navel-gazing, drug-addled narcissists with no room in their lives or thought in their heads for anything beyond themselves, no capacity for transcendence, and not even the neurons to anticipate its existence. And who decided to show young people unironically smoking cigarettes in 2015, as if it isn't a monstrously stupid and self-destructive activity? And then to show the film at a festival specifically aimed at high school students?Boring because it was dripping with cliché characters whose lives are supposed to be meaningful simply because they yearn to create, despite the cavernous emptiness of their vision and their lives. I am always offended when a filmmaker thinks he can make me care about a character by resorting to trite "fashion designer Barbie" and "sensitive artist Ken" stereotypes. Sorry, you have to work harder than that to involve me in whatever the heck you were trying to say.What little empathy I was able to feel for the characters, and what little involvement in the plot I was able to work up, was in any case jerked away from me by frequent smash-cuts to scenes of a supposedly older and wiser Lily being interviewed by a disembodied voice while she floated against an abstract white background. I expected either that it would turn out she had died during the main action, or had been admitted to a psychiatric facility, or that Morpheus would eventually explain to her that her dilettantish career in fashion and her party-hardy nights were simply a shallow manifestation of the fact that her brain had been sitting in a jar all along.No such luck, unfortunately. That would have meant that something actually happened in the film, which was clearly not the plan.Lily & Kat was probably meant to be a personal description of the challenges involved in trying to create meaningful art while having absolutely nothing to say. It might have worked as a cautionary tale about exactly that, had it the wit to achieve self-awareness, which it certainly did not.Turns out that passing the Bechdel Test may be enough to attract good people and funding to a project but not enough to make a film watchable.I hope that director Micael Preysler will go on to do something great. I feel sure that Jessica Rothe will. Hannah Murray already has. But this wasn't it.