A mish mashy melange was my first reaction on watching this. Then i watched it again and could see more coherence in it.
It’s structured around all the ordinary small stuff we have to do to get through the every day: waking up, washing, brushing teeth, shaving, making breakfast, lunch and so on.
And then there’s the bigger life-events like coping with illness, getting married, having babies.
Questions are asked like, “What’s in your pocket?” or “What do you love/fear? A lonely guy loves his cat… another guy loves his fridge.. another guy fears his hair falling out… a woman fears “not being a mummy”… and so on..
At times the editing is very fast: periodic montage sequences whizz by a conveyor belt of transient images like a Planet Earth ad break.
But then there are several personal pieces that follow individual situations. I liked these slower stories better, such as
The post-graduate returning to Essex to catch up with his “old man” dad, both sat in the car, sharing a burger.
The gay guy coming out to grandma on the phone (“I love you too” he’s saying to her)
And the sad scenarios: of the father lighting incense at shrine of dead wife – and the little sons perfunctory remembrance of his mother; or the “Family project” of mother dying of cancer, trying to help her anxious young son make sense of it; or the thankful – tearful – Aussie in hospital after major heart surgery “I’ll be out there again, doing crazy things, and enjoying life” he says. But you sense he probably won’t.
There’s smiley bits too, like the Peruvian shoeshine boy; the rude wedding vows read by the English vicar.
And some nasty bits, like the slaughter of cow, its throat being slashed into to let blood – and there’s a rapidly cut together montage of scenes of violence and fighting – deliberately rushed through so as not to dwell too long. The shoplifting Russian/Slav is a bit dismaying too (firstly, that he’s filmed getting away with it; secondly that the clip gets sent to be included in the film; and thirdly – that it is included!)
Throughout, is the continual narrative thread of a Korean cycling around the world for the last 9 years – feeling homesick for Korean flies.
Come the afternoon outdoor pursuits – like skydiving out of planes – and Life in a Day has got to feel exhausting.
So much packed in, so much to pack in. I think a million sub-editors were needed to prune the 4500 hours of submitted footage into a mere 90 minutes – just a blink of the Earths eye really.
To begin with i was wanting not to like it, but come the end i was won over. Out of all this mashed up diffuseness something cogent got produced. Although I wonder how much actual directing input Kevin MacDonald did to it. It looks more like a cut and paste collaboration, the chopped up product of countless hours of endless editing – rather than something that’s been singularly created.
Question is, would selective clicking on any YouTube vids on any day of the year produce the same result? No, cus this is more of a polished product. But watching a load of randomised clips would probably seem as arbitrary as this film feels. And the effect would feel similar: trawling in too much information just makes the net of your attention go saggy.
I might watch this again one day (Unless they come up with another life in another day next year)
At the end – 2 minutes before midnight – there’s a girl in a car bemoaning the fact that “I spent the whole day waiting for something great to happen….all day long nothing really happened…i want people to know that i’m here…. i don’t want to cease to exist”
“I don’t want to cease to exist”. As long as you’re seen on YouTube, you can pretend you don’t. If you get my drift.
Dir: Kevin MacDonald, England
7/10
Windows on the World 