Show Me What You Got (Svelana Cvetko, 2019): USA

Reviewed by Scott Kipp at SBIFF 2020.

The film Show Me What You Got was filled with gratuitous beauty, missed opportunities and worthless scenes. If you want to see three beautiful people fall in love and have a fling in LA and Puglia, Italy, then this picture is for you.  If you want to see a good story where the characters are developed and every scene makes sense and adds meaning, then you should wait till you have a lot of time to kill before watching this film.

The black and white film starts with the Italian Marcelo, played by Mattia Minasi, getting mad at his troubled life on the Malibu Pier. Marcelo throws a weak tantrum on the pier and kicks and punches the pier while Nassim watches. The calm, French-Iranian Nassim, played by Neyssan Falahi, is the second leg of the stool and misses his flight to Iran to teach Mattia martial arts on the beach. Marcelo is a clutz and ends up giving his teacher a bloody nose, so they go to the local coffee shop where they meet the gorgeous Christine, played by Cristina Rambaldi, the final leg in the stool.  The three hit it off and soon jump into bed like horny twenty-somethings will do.

The story has interesting possibilities where two well-to-do foreign men fall in love with a poor, beautiful, American girl, but there is more contemplative brooding and avoidance of life than meaningful situations or character growth. The film has beautiful but meaningless scenes on scooters or the beach instead of poignant action or deep conversations.

What mainly took the fun out of the movie for me was poor editing after shaky cinematography. The clarity of the black and white close-ups were really good, but the long shots were shaky and needed editing. The main long shot that I’m thinking of is where the threesome run to the beach. The low camera angle highlighted the wooden path that leads to the ocean. The three beautiful stars run down the path and shrink into the grand landscape.

The actors playfully ran over fifty yards, so the shot was over eight seconds and they should have cut it there. Instead, the camera got shaky and then tilted to the sky to look at some random clouds. Was the shaky camera and tilt to the clouds a miss by the editor? Were they trying to say something about the shakiness of life for these twenty somethings who don’t understand the big picture of where they were going?

I could speculate all day long, but I had the advantage of having the director and cinematographer, Svelana Cvetko, in front of me after the film.  I asked Svelena why they did shaky, long shots and she said it was because she didn’t use a tripod to save some time. David Scott Smith, the producer, writer and editor, said they (jokingly?) threw the tripods in the ocean.  Maybe he was joking but they seemed to have contempt for the useful device. I think they should go fish the tripod out of the sea or at least edit the shaky cinematography out.  Maybe I’m asking too much to have a steady camera and well-edited scenes, but I’d rather see a movie that had more meat to it than garnish.