17/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: US indie maverick Josh Mond’s second feature sees a filmmaker arranging his troubled friend’s video diaries into a documentary

Forget AI – social media “reels” may have an even starker impact on audiovisual storytelling and filmmaking in the coming years. As successively updated short-video compilations, they’re arguably the most addictive feature of Instagram; even Facebook has redesigned its homepage so friends’ new dispatches are where your eye lands. It does turn us into pseudo-filmmakers, each touch or press taking the end user along a linear chronology, each image building upon the next.

Despite being set between 2014 and 2021, when this FaceTime-based “aesthetic” was still evolving, the fragments of first-person, to-camera narration that comprise It Doesn’t Matter [+see also:
interview: Josh Mond
film profile] feel fully inspired by reels, making it an achievement of fluid montage storytelling from its director, Josh Mond. Christopher Abbott (Poor Things [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Suzy Bemba
Q&A: Yorgos Lanthimos
film profile]) plays a surrogate for the filmmaker, who splices video-diary clips from his childhood pal Alvaro (Jay Will) into a coherent documentary feature, except that it’s all “staged”, making this a fiction film merely imitating a doc. It premiered yesterday in Cannes’ ACID section, which specialises in authentically independent work such as this.

It Doesn’t Matter succeeds for two primary reasons, one of these placing some vital tension upon the other. Like iPhone or first-person POV-shot films, or those taking place in a claustrophobic, sole location, a chief justification for its existence is to successfully prove it can be made at all. Second is the particular power dynamic between the unnamed filmmaker (let’s call him Chris – it’s a one-syllable name with a concluding “s” sound, a bit like Josh), an archetypal white NYC hipster creative, and Alvaro himself, a young African-American man of Honduran descent, living a precarious existence of unstable employment and near-homelessness. Chris loves Alvaro as a friend, yet mines his struggles and charisma for creative source material – can he treat him as an ethical documentary subject, a near co-author of it all, or will Alvaro be further victimised and othered? The same applies to Mond, embarking on the project to privilege a different gaze to his own.

The video messages are typically exchanged from separate poles across the country, with Chris in Brooklyn buzzing Alvaro, who might be as far west as Hawaii (accessible by air, of course, without a passport), or in Portland, where he’s gained his latest menial labour gig. Occasionally, Chris joins him out west in person, where he films their interactions in a two shot: an atmospherically captured trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, becomes an opportunity for a true heart-to-heart bonding session, where Alvaro recounting his upbringing as the child of immigrants, followed by parental estrangement, can be co-opted as backstory “exposition” to help his movie flow.

It’s both an auto-critique – Mond showing his working – and a legitimate swipe at a certain type of indie filmmaker (say, the Safdie brothers and their ilk), who scout a rolodex of colourful “characters” that can be deployed as non-pro on-screen participants in their movies, the relationship always teetering between true friend and employee, a collaborator or one coerced. Yet Alvaro’s story of second-generation immigrant meandering, and his ability to finally pull himself together, is cathartic and touching, and it deserves a platform, even if Chris’ s media-savvy skills are what build it.

It Doesn’t Matter is a co-production by the USA and France, staged by CHMOND Inc and Films AdeMD.