‘Room in a Crowd’ REVIEW: Like Puzzle Pieces
‘Room in a Crowd’ REVIEW: Like Puzzle Pieces
A snippet from one of three student films shot over the pandemic and inserted into Room in a Crowd. Still taken from IMDB
For anyone, witnessing a John Torres picture is an immeasurable experience that is equal parts confusion and profoundness. It can be quite jarring as the director has an inclination towards melding the practice of filmmaking with true-to-life events and stories. It would be best to summarize such a guy by introducing one to works such as Todo Todo Teros or Lukas The Strange, but this is a topic for another time.
Instead, and looking into the present, one finds John Torres continuing such an adventure in The Remotes — I mean, Room in a Crowd. Well, to briefly mention, the film is partly a preview of the former, where Room in a Crowd seeks to outline it, among many things, with his grasp of the current reality. Feeding off the discomfort of the pandemic, local journalism deaths, and the growth of his newborn daughter, Torres made Room in a Crowd as a means to make sense of his own reality as it is today.
Room in a Crowd utilizes what is essentially a collective scattering of fragmented thoughts and musings to deliver an incredibly ethereal experience. It’s the type of meta-documentary powered by those aforementioned ideas, where he lingers on his own anxieties and uncertainties with life and converts such emotions into something quite tangible. Effectively, he delivers an hour-long knockout experience that begs the curiosity of why it was only screened once during the QCinema Film Festival.
It’s impressive how disjointed, yet cohesive Torres continues to be. The full interplay of reality and filmmaking exist throughout, as Torres utilizes very smooth but jarring segments to also talk about how the plot of The Remotes bleeds heavily into reality (plotline is that a driver has access via a remote in his car to tap into various “avatars” around an island, where said “avatars” are actually characters shot from behind-the-scenes of footage of other films (see, this is how weird the premise gets!) and then cuts into a collection of submitted student recordings from his film class over the pandemic. There’s a sort of harmonic chaos with how he constructs all of this.
A visually stretched road going into nowhere. Still taken from the QCinema website
Without even diving much into how he includes his other personal sentiments about the world regarding journalism, comfort, and family, it’s easy to regard how impressive Room in a Crowd feels, even for viewers who aren’t necessarily familiar with such an unorthodox style of filmmaking. John Torres’ fascination for blurring the lines here continues the excellence found in Todo Todo Teros, albeit in a more explicit and incredibly passionate manner that communicates such a confusion with such conciseness that its emotions become incredibly tangible.
There’s a certain edge to Room in a Crowd being special in that regard, especially as its live score adds greater textures to an already immersive experience. Itos Ledesma, with the accidental involvement of a malfunctioning right speaker, helped convert this experimental film into something living and breathing, a piece of work that is worthy of being thought about every now and then. It’s not often that a filmmaker exists to make a piece of art that transcends silver screens and Dolby sound systems, creates whole cohesion out of unfit puzzle pieces, and delivers an experience like no other.
How soon can we possibly view The Remotes?
‘Room in a Crowd’ was screened as part of QCinema 2024’s QCLokal lineup.
