Here, Beat asks you to forgive our coyness with specifics.
“Everything started [as I was] reading a magazine,” Elena Trapé tells of the inspiration for her debut feature film, Blog . “I was in shock when I read [the article in question]. My first reaction was, ‘Oh my god, these girls are crazy!'” Perfect fodder to base a film on, then.
Here, Beat asks you to forgive our coyness with specifics. We can’t reveal much about the article which Trapé cites as the stimulation for Blog, except that it concerned a group of teenage girls who made a ********* **** at a ************* **** ****** in ****. Frustrating, we know, but to tell anymore would undermine Blog‘s considerable dramatic cuff when it screens in Melbourne next week as part of the La Mirada festival of Spanish film. Just take our word that the film is a sincere and mature exploration of youthful naivety and, as such, is well worth saving a slot for in your festival calendar.
Set in Spain circa now, Blog homes its focus on seven15 year-old girls of the comfortable/comfortably numb variety. Each is beset by her particular strain of angst-driven solipsism (too popular/too heavy/sexually confused/invisible to the opposite sex etc). In a bid to elude the hum-drummery of high-school life, the girls form a secret society. The club has no higher agenda – at least, not one which the audience is immediately privy to. Rather, the exact nature of the group’s objective – or if indeed an objective will even arise – is the question which nudges Blog towards its surprising final act. Overarching dramatic tension is achieved via structural shuffling: temporally, the movie folds back on itself after the bait-and-hook of its earliest scenes.
Any film hinged on teenagers inevitably sinks or swims by the prowess of its young cast. Thankfully, Trapé managed to assemble a remarkable ensemble of first-timers and non-pros to lend Blog its desired air of naturalism. “We had a workshop before the shoot for three months,” she explains. “I was working with the girls and one acting coach twice per week. During this workshop they learned to improvise. They learned what we were expecting from them and what their characters were about. They are very close to their characters. Their characters are exaggerations of themselves.”
The workshop approach paid off. “People ask if the girls were friends before shooting; if they studied together at the same high school. That’s the best compliment we can get!,” Trapé beams.
For the majority of its runtime, Blog unfolds via both webcam footage (which is often overlayed with real-time IM chat transcripts) and roving handicam sequences, à la Cloverfield and [REC]. The prevalence of lo-fi digital textures – which audiences programmatically associate with self-documentation – helps casts the spectator as voyeur, not least in the passages where the girls let their guards down on video-blogs recorded in their own bedrooms.
“I gave [each of the girls] a small camera for three or four days and asked them to record themselves doing whatever they wanted,” Trapé replies when asked how rehearsed these confessional sequences were. “The material we got from them was [so] amazing that we decided that we needed to have that kind of material – completely spontaneous and sincere – in the movie. So we decided to place a small camera in the real bedrooms of the seven main characters, [which] they had for six months.” When Blog‘s plot demanded it, she provided prompts for the girls to riff on in these scenes. But these instances were exceptions rather than rule. “Most of the webcams are completely spontaneous,” Trapé stresses, keen to share Blog‘s success with her cast.
This emotional sincerity was vital to Trapé’s vision for Blog, which she hoped would provide a more thoughtful alternative to the sensationalised teens who tend to populate popular culture.
“I don’t know [what it’s like] in Australia, but here in Spain, movies and television series make a portrait of teenagers as crazy people!,” she laughs. “[People seem to think] they just think about taking drugs and having sex all the time. When I started the casting process, meeting the girls and the guys, [it became clear] that they are not like that at all.”
The La Mirada Film Festival runs at ACMI from Thursday April 14 – Tuesday April 26. Blog screens Monday April 18 and Thursday April 21. For more information, visit lamirada.org.au or check out their iPhone app.
