My faithful readers know that I can stomach very, very bad movies. But where I may laugh at terrible thrillers or cringe at crappy comedies, what really irritates me is pretentiousness. And it’s been a while since I saw anything quite as pretentious as Incomplete, a short film made to make cinemaphiles feel sophisticated for watching a man breakdance his heartache to the sound of a melancholy cello.1
Officially, it’s about a man who longs for somebody he hasn’t met yet. But this is not true. He is not longing for somebody, he’s just longing for some body. It’s simply a short film about a man who daydreams about falling in love with every guy he sees. One of his victims is a dude with a ponytail so long it’s just a regular horse tail who sits at a chessboard in a park.
This is the sort of filth the protagonist fantasises about: 2
Of course he is imagining himself making a perfectly sensible move (1.g3) and then his opponent replying like a particularly uncivilised gibbon (2.a5). He seems the type to argue badly against claims no one has ever made.
And we haven’t even plumbed the depth of depravity of his mind. Here, he imagines them locking hands and sweeping the pieces off the board! The ungodly
Realism: 5/5 At the time of writing, the lichess database contains over a hundred thousand games that led to this position. There’s apparently a lot of uncivilised gibbons with internet access.
Probable winner: It’s white‘s dreams we’re following here, so it’s probably him.
1. [At least the cello has some pity for the chessmen.] ↩
2. [This pot would be incomplete3 without this link.] ↩
3. [Of course, that a sufficient condition for incompleteness, not a] ↩