Movie Reviews for Writers: Velvet

First. Don’t get this one mixed up with the remarkable Spanish series about the department store. It’s not that Velvet (as good as that is). 

Okay? So now that we’re on the same page. 

Be warned. This movie has a lot of skin. I mean, a lot of skin. But that doesn’t mean it’s erotic. It’s about as sexy as a discussion on existentialism. And that’s fine. Because what this movie does (and does well, though some would call it boring — it doesn’t really have action) is ride around in the mind of a pondering young woman who decides to write a book and along the way discovers who she is in the process. 

It’s very thinky. Know that. 

In spite of the nudity. 

You’ll be contemplating the beautiful scenery more than the naked woman on screen. 

Serious. Trust me. 

The film does a good but not perfect job of being a sort of stream-of-consciousness movie. It’s dreamlike and it paints with a very slow-moving and overly lush palette of wide-shot scenery and close-up body shots. It even seems to fade from one thought to the next without clear scene breaks. Like I said, very dreamlike. 

It’s way too easy to just write it off as a student film with financing though. While it would never appeal to action and adventure fans, it does echo the thoughtfulness of some of the great French films of the sixties. Just… slower and with a lot more meandering. 

Enough about that. We want to look at what it has to say about us, the writers who watch it. And the answer is, quite a lot more than I expected, even if those bits are blended into the rest of the surreal formlessness of the “plot.” 

Well, the biggest point it makes, even with so much silence and scenery, is that for the artist, it is through our work we discover who we are. We tend to know more about ourselves at the end of a work than at the beginning. 

Read the full review: 

https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2022/07/movie-reviews-for-writers-velvet.html