REVIEW - BLUE CAPRICE

All of us feel sad sometimes. But there is a point at which sadness has ceased to be merely sadness, and has instead become clinical depression. All of us feel nervous sometimes. But there is a point at which nervousness has ceased to be merely nervousness, and has instead become clinical anxiety. And all of us feel angry sometimes. So is there not a point at which anger reaches a degree of intensity that it too can be classified as mental illness? I'm no expert, hell no, but I plainly can't grasp the notion that any body capable of committing cold-blooded, indiscriminate, remorseless murder en masse might possibly be legally sane. Alexandre Moors paints the murderers in his solid debut Blue Caprice as enormously troubled figures, to the extent that they'd be candidates for extensive medical assistance were it not for the fact that no-one noticed them in time, and so they find themselves behind bars, having shot and killed several innocent people out of sheer, terrifying arrogance. But who would have noticed them? Where does a young, or even not so young, man turn when abandoned by the life he once knew as his own, having likely never been nurtured as one must be in order to lead a stable life in an unforgiving society? The path to isolation, and on then to insanity, is a short slope downhill, and it's so much easier to fall down it than to climb up the steeper slope to an uncertain future. A cool procedural of the encounter and ensuing relationship between two such men, Blue Caprice is an adroit examination of the sort of mind that could perpetrate acts of violence so extreme without any apparent concern, while smartly acknowledging that minds like these are largely impenetrable to most human beings. Not a moment is wasted in this tight, 90-minute-odd film, but Moors' directorial style is a bit too slick to allow us to venture into the story as far as we might like, and Ronnie Porto's screenplay too timid and too orthodox to truly challenge or surprise. But the film is engaging, and the final act particularly so - astonishingly assured filmmaking from a writer and a director each on only their first feature film.