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Paul Kael (Kola Krauze) is a jaded film-critic who is on the verge of losing his job after writing an overwhelmingly negative review that compromises the publication he works for. As an ultimatum he's sent to review an advance screening of the film "The Most Important Film Ever Made". As soon as Kael enters the cinema he is also thrown into a parallel dimension where film becomes a waking nightmare and finds the very truth he's been negating himself to see in every film he's ever reviewed.CLEAN COLORED WIRE is an exercise in meta-narrative and a close examination of the relationship between the audience and the film, film critics and filmmakers and filmmakers and their work. We have witnessed the "Breaking of the fourth wall" in many films, from Oliver Hardy to Groucho Marx, Woody Allen in Annie Hall and Matthew Broderick in Ferris Buller's Day Off. However, the meta-narrative of CLEAN COLORED WIRE is closer to Alejandro Jodorowsky's THE HOLLY MOUNTAIN and its closing shots. As we begin the film, we meet Paul Kael as played by Kola Krauze. Paul is your typical jaded film-critic, he is given an advanced screener in DVD form of Ludving Gür's latest film "Disappearance" which the film critic reviews in his underwear and Eraserhead shirt. First, Paul no longer bothers to attend screenings at the cinema (or Movie Theater for the yanks) and he approaches film criticism as a task he can't be bothered with even dressing for, some may say there's nothing wrong with watching movies in your pajamas, but this signifies the complete and total detachment to with which Paul approaches film. Paul completely savages Gür's film in his review, however, his review is masquerading as a passionate rant, for in reality it reads as the most common and unimaginative type of film review we can all come across in any "respectable" film magazine. Gür reads the review and it stings him at a molecular level, after all, his film is an extension of his being. Paul's antics get him in hot water with his boss and he's no longer afforded the commodities and privileges of being provided advanced DVDs of upcoming films, he must return to watching film on the big screen with an audience. In our day and age, it is increasingly common that films are being consumed not by getting up and heading to "the movie house", but now we are in an age where academy voters choose the films they will nominate by being provided DVD screeners of films that are sent directly to their homes (they are busy people, surely they have no time to see films, despite the fact that they work in the film business) worse even, as physical media is becoming a new inconvenience and films are now being streamed not just to your TV (which is now shaped like a movie Widescreen) but sadly directly to a phone or a tablet. Paul attends the screening of the aptly titled THE MOST IMPORTANT MOVIE EVER MADE, which almost every film that is marketed for the commercial sector is sold as, people don't go to the movies to experience human stories anymore, people go to attend big events, something to justify getting up from the coach and driving to the multiplex, if it's a smaller film, any of the streaming services will do, but in order to actually go to see a film, it must be sold as the event of the year, the film to end all films. Hyperbole aside, he must review this film but he's now sharing space along with that most inconvenient of hive-minds: the audience. People has stopped attending films at the movie theater in grand part because audiences just don't know how to behave anymore. While it is true that film should be experienced in the big screen as it is meant, the experience has been hampered by people using their smart-phones and people who bring their babies and small children to what is sometimes an adult-only affair. What Paul witnesses on the screen is mostly a pretentious art-film, as a man (the filmmaker) puts his statement directly to the audience, without any effort for subtlety, or perhaps this is only Paul's perception. The audience may have seen a film, that while blunt, was still enjoyable, but Paul is so jaded that instead of watching stories he sees the filmmaker's intentions in full display as if the filmmaker was speaking directly to him. Gür's intentions are no different, he goes gets to far more elaborate lengths to make his point across, his short film is the modern un-romanticized film experience: critics are jaded, audiences don't care, filmmakers have forgotten to be subtle and people are ultimately living in a film of their own and when they die it all fades to black without any credits rolling, no applause from the audience.Ludving Gür is a very young filmmaker with an already impressive body of work of short films under his belt. The young filmmaker carries his influences on plain sight: Lynch and his labyrinthine psychological trappings, Nicholas Winding Relfn and his neon drenched cinematography, Gaspar Noé's audacity and willingness to make the audience uncomfortable and Alejandro Jodorowsky's blunt surrealism in service of the truth. He doesn't carry these influences as a means to say "see... I watch real films" but more as in "see... I'm in a complicated relationship with film", it's not just flashing cinematic credentials for the sake of points, but rather weaponizing his influences and making it part of his film arsenal which eventually becomes his own language. This is a film about film, but it's also about how film doesn't exist without an audience, without filmmakers, without critics. Film has lost something because audiences have lost their way, they don't know how to approach film anymore, and this in turn affects films themselves. What happens within the screen is a result of what happens outside the screen, but it's also true that what happens within the screen will influence the world outside, changing lives forever. Yes, every film, even this one could be title THE MOST IMPORTANT FILM EVER MADE.
