From the Film Reel: "True" by Tom Tykwer

"I see you."

This 10 minute short is taken from Paris Je'taime (2004).  Tom Tykwer's "True" is by far my favourite film, needless to say my favourite short film. I rank it so high based on its ability to move and amaze me every subsequent time I watch it. The story is so simply conveyed - it tells the story of a man rushing through a memory of a romance he shares with an amazing woman as this memory runs through his mind at lightning speed, all disjointed in snippets of the moments they shared which carry so much sentimental weight. This film, though short, completely epitomizes the spiralling feeling of falling in love uncontrollably.

The music, produced by Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimer and Tom Tykwer only adds a tension: the yearning, the spiralling, confusion, disorientation, the urgency to understand, the fragility of young love, vulnerability, all wrapped up in less than 10 minutes of pure ecstasy: The whirlwind of a romance and a relationship that takes you by the heart and doesn't let go. Tykwer never lets Thomas' blindness in anyway hinder the relationship, but rather uses it to connect and bring Francine and Thomas closer. The thing I love about the film is the subjectivity of the digetic and the its play on the irrationality of time and occurrences, with references to their physical distance reflecting their emotional distance as life attempts to pull them apart. You are left with adrenaline and sentiment and a greater understanding of life laced with its twists and turns. Furthermore, Tykwer uses the actors’ very real disability to channel a heightened perceptive imagination and visual adding to the subjectivity of the storyline. More than anything, this film assures me that the subjectivity and vulnerability in the human condition is what my favourite cinema is all about, using techniques to convey human experience in its fullest extent and allowing the poetry of everyday life impact our lives in the largest way. “True” captures the subjectivity of time and the speed at which it progresses relative to what you are experiencing or feeling at the time. In this context, this frame of mind, the elements of time and space are completely irrational.

Tykwer himself describes "True" as his masterpiece and rejoices on the experience of making something so true to life saying that "True" is an entire life captured in 10 minutes. This is truly a work of art. I am only so happy that Tykwer has made us privy to the complexities and uncertainties that all who have loved, and all who will love have and will experience in that it is nervous, reckless, unafraid, naive, urgent, uncontrollable and fragile; capturing a moment in time that is so raw within itself, using the element of time to skew the rationality of a great romance.