Matteo Sanders

DECISIONS

We make decisions every day but not all decisions carry the same weight. The film Decisions captures three situations where a decision in unavoidable but painful, in a way. Sometimes, choosing a perfect pair of shoes seems nearly impossible but in other scenarios a relationship or even a life can be at stake.
(Text by Adéla Drdová)

"The film DECISIONS by Jakub Jelínek and Matteo Sanders is a thirteen-minute collection of three short stories on one theme: decisions. Each of them gives us a glimpse into the everyday life of different pairs of people. Through the parallels of these stories and a specific film style, the film explores how difficult it can sometimes be to make both small and complex decisions. The first story is about a young couple who are on a date at a restaurant. While the man is trying to discuss a topic that is important to him, the girl can't decide what to order for her meal. The second is about a mother and her child who are trying in vain to choose new soccer cleats. The third story is about a man and his lover discussing their relationship in the car and the possibility of the man telling his wife about it."

(Text, Martin Audrlický)

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"Natural actors, dialogues that reveal enough to arouse curiosity, but at the same time not so much that they leave no room for guessing what exactly is going on."

- Martin Šrajer, jury member FAMUFEST 2021

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Film Critique by Martin Audrlický

The film DECISIONS by Jakub Jelínek and Matteo Sanders is a thirteen-minute collection of three short stories on one theme: decision. Each of them gives us a glimpse into the everyday lives of different pairs of people. Through the parallels of these stories and a specific film style, the film explores how difficult it can sometimes be to make both small and complex decisions.

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The first story is about a young couple on a date in a restaurant. While the man is trying to discuss a topic important to him, the girl can't decide what to order for her meal. The second is about a mother and her child who are trying in vain to choose new soccer cleats. The third story is about a man and his lover discussing their relationship in the car and the possibility of the man telling his wife about it. We don't initially expect a three-way split in the plot, which makes the film curious about what the stories have in common. Very quickly, however, we realize that there is no narrative link between the stories, allowing us to focus on the context of implicit meanings. In this way, the film unburdens itself with a plot based on simple everyday activities and distills the theme of decision-making, which gradually develops as the only common denominator of all the situations depicted.

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The film pushes the meaning of the action beyond the story itself, even though at some points we don't even know what the debate between the characters is really about. It may seem that their discussion is only on some superficial level, but through their behaviour the actors let us know that in reality their decision-making is of a much more fundamental nature. The narrative is thus strongly constrained, both to highlight how often the issues are more complex than they appear and to allow for generalisations about the situations depicted.

In all cases, the decisions that the characters in the stories must make are based on a conflict with the person's counterpart. This is accentuated by the work with film space. Rarely are the two opposing characters seen in the same shot, which creates alienation and tension between them, making their decisions even more dramatic. This effect is heightened in the last short story, in which we don't see the couple in a double take once in the entire film, even though we know the characters are sitting together in the car.

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The film DECISIONS is not a spatial but a temporal triptych of short stories, offering a parallel that dramatically emphasizes the theme of decision-making in its construction. Against the backdrop of an interchangeable plot that is not difficult to identify with, the film analytically analyses the mental processes we go through in our everyday dilemmas without realizing it. This effect is aided by the detached style, whether it's the unspecified topic of discussion or the alienating framing of the characters. As a result, the film is detached for the characters within it, but it makes us understandably aware of how difficult it can be to agree with someone and make a decision.​

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This text was created thanks to the cooperation between FAMUFEST and the Department of Film Studies at FFUK.