Bright Interior
Two people, one flat, forty years.
- drama
- romance
- comedy
The warmest and most precisely observed film of the year, and the only one that made the whole room cry.
What works
- A screenplay with not one wasted line
- Ageing make-up that never once pulls you out
- Funny in a way that makes the sad parts land harder
What falls short
- The 1994 section is noticeably thinner than the rest
Bright Interior takes place almost entirely in one flat, across four decades, and never once feels like a filmed play. Chandrasekaran finds a new way to shoot the same four rooms each time we return to them, so the space ages alongside the people in it.
The trick it pulls
The film's structure is its argument: we visit this couple at intervals, and what has happened in between is left to inference. It is a device that could easily have been glib. Instead it does the thing that only cinema does well — it makes you feel the passage of time as loss and accumulation at once.
The comedy is what makes it work. Two people who have known each other this long are funny about it, and the film lets them be, right up until it does not.
We are not running out of time. We are just spending it.
Awards
- BAFTAOutstanding British Film
- BAFTAOriginal Screenplay
- Academy AwardsOriginal Screenplay