Look At Me

In a revealing flashback, the story behind how Connor Vasile’s character came to be nonresponsive is revealed. After a brief interaction with his Croatian parents, the self-conscious man goes to a hectic party and consumes copious amounts of alcohol to fit in with the crowd.

Wayland Bell’s deliberately intrusive cinematography lingers beside the characters via fluctuating close-ups. The camera is ever so slightly still during the flashback, just before Vasile becomes embarrassingly drunk at a party. When he stumbles to the subway, the distorted effect of intoxication is deftly imitated by nauseating camerawork.

“…deliberately intrusive cinematography lingers beside the characters…”

The last scene of Look At Me features the social media activist quoting James Baldwin in her notebook, and then taking a picture of that quote and posting it on Instagram. The activist is now utilizing the intended value of that quote for gratification. Instead of taking those words in for personal virtue, she is keener on letting everyone else know what she perceives as notable. For some people, the more likes they attract, tweets they publish, and the pictures they take, the more garbled their self-image becomes. I have a feeling that the film’s social media activist is compensating for her lack of doing by promoting sapient thinking.

Exercising a naturalistic style that doesn’t yield a blaring score or an amplified dilemma, it’s as if Nika Fehmiu simply invaded the space of three people on the subway one night. Through the stellar acting from Hadley Robinson and Connor Vasile, their characters are both vulnerable and misguided. Nika Fehmiu’s Look At Me is an eye-opening reminder of how fractured society’s become as we can no longer determine if someone needs grave assistance, which more or less has to do with our obsession with social media and self-interest.

Look At Me screened at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival.