The gaze that takes us into the world of Malayalam movies is more voyeuristic than satirical.
If news breaks that this was the work of Jis Joy’s evil twin, I wouldn’t be surprised.
But with Innale Vare, he sheds his Archies Experience Store aesthetic to embrace the darker side of the movie business. We had Lal Jose playing a version of himself in Sunday Holiday and his previous film Mohan Kumar Fans was almost entirely about an ex-superstar. The same goes with the director’s obsession with situations and characters arising from the Malayalam film industry. Scenes set in the day, for instance, are soaked in so much golden light that even lunchtime feels like it’s 6 AM. There are bits that remind you that you’re still in a far corner of the same brightly-lit world he’s worked hard to build in his other films. Of course, you don’t really doubt that you’re watching the work of writers Bobby and Sanjay, but the fact that feel-good extraordinaire Jis Joy has directed this makes you want to observe it more keenly. The chasmic emotion, the consuming devotion for your artistic heroes, the way it makes even the darkest recesses of your brain feel temporarily OK – that, for Eilish, her fans, and viewers, is strikingly real.It might take you a minute, but you’ll be tempted to double-check the name of the director around 15 minutes into Innale Vare.
When she breaks down for a full 30 seconds upon meeting him, in one of The World’s a Little Blurry’s best scenes, it may as well be any one of the crying, alight faces in her crowds. Eilish, so devoted to Bieber as a 12-year-old that Baird considered putting her in therapy, speaks fluently of the hyper-intense adoration lobbed at her by millions, predominantly teenage girls.
Its strongest element, aside from Eilish herself, is the generosity and empathy afforded to the experience of fandom. The film has its fair share of intimate moments: a tic-attack from her Tourette’s, a forlorn phone call with a distant, inattentive (now-ex) boyfriend she has not previously discussed with the public, quiet backstage disappointment with what she considers to be a subpar Coachella performance (“You forgot some words to a new song, big deal, who cares?” O’Connell, consistently the most dad of dads, supplies). Thus Cutler’s film feels like watching Eilish be Eilish, even as she mugs to the camera in the style of her favorite show, The Office. But whereas Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, released last year on Netflix, often felt like a meticulous, if entertaining, propaganda project, The World’s a Little Blurry portrays an artist for whom the idea of “authenticity” is both artistically important and for filming, passé.Įilish was born in 2001 and grew up accustomed to documentation, by family and oneself as she told Colbert this week, “I don’t really change in front of a camera.” Part of the hook of The World’s a Little Blurry’s is to watch a star who understands, as do her fans who grew up on Snapchat and Instagram, that to be on camera is to be both yourself and not – the calibration is so fluid, and so ubiquitous, as to be nearly indistinguishable, or maybe more accurately, irrelevant, to “real” life.īillie Eilish and her father Patrick O’Connell. It also includes all the promises of authenticity we’ve come to expect from modern music documentaries: quiet moments, the stress of touring, the vertigo of rapid-onset fame, work process competency porn. The film glides on the always-magnetic juxtaposition of superstardom weirdness with relatability – Eilish DM-ing her idol, Justin Bieber, posting to her millions of Instagram followers, selecting her signature baggy couture outfits for tour Eilish studying for her driver’s permit, complaining about her family’s lame cars, or groaning when her father compares new music to a Duncan Sheik song.
The camera roves through the family home, dropping in on family arguments (Maggie and Finneas, and then Eilish, arguing over the latter’s reluctance to make an “accessible” hit) and Eilish’s bedroom the morning of her Grammy nominations. The trust afforded to Cutler (The War Room, The September Issue) by Eilish’s family – mom Maggie Baird and father Patrick O’Connell, both near-constant presences – is evident.