“Platonic” by David Leidy

The greatest power of cinema lies in its possibility to represent the furthermost corner of the psyche, giving it life, color and image. In this dreamlike short film called “Platonic”, a professor has a weird dream about a murder and when she wakes up she finds a pregnant woman in her house.

The greatest value of this film lies in its language: a grammar made of dissolves transitions, juxtapositions and colors that give all the narration an eerie atmosphere, in which subconscious emerges and dominates. The weird relationship that we perceive among the two women, that will lead us to understand what really happened under the thick layer of psychology, is the relationship between two characters that originated from the same feeling, like children of a common mother.

Cinematography makes this mysterious game even more fascinating, with its saturated red, blue and purple tint, its shallow bokeh, its distotions, and editing helps us in associating the story with bigger feelings, feelings of origin and end.

Its electronic soundtrack, that reminded us of the music style of the late Refn’s films, helps the rhythm of the editing and of the direction to achieve multiple layers of narration, none of this completely imagined nor completely true.

In the style of Lynch, we find ourselves into a film where we don’t know who is dreaming and what is actually the dream, what is the layer we should perceive as real and what is subconscious.

It is a pleasure to lose ourselves into these layers, trying to find the map to understand the meaning of the dream and of the life connected to it.