Cashback

Hmmm. I'm not sure that Sean Ellis's 2004 short film really needed expanding upon, but at least he did manage to reunite Sean Biggerstaff and Emelia Fox to tell this extended tale of "Ben". He's an art student who has recently been dumped by his girlfriend and finds himself unable to sleep. His solution - a night time job in a supermarket where he has an opportunity to ogle a variety of beautiful women. Then something miraculous happens. No - not a wet dream, he discovers that by cracking his fingers he can freeze time. All of the customers in his shop becomes statuesque. Now this is just too good an opportunity for our frustrated sketcher, so he wanders around finding the prettiest then exposes their breasts or their butts so he can draw them. Meantime, back in the real world his love life is going from bad to worse; his best mate "Sean" (Sean Higgins) isn't proving much use and his colleagues at work just love a lame prank to wind up the boss "Jenkins" (Stuart Goodwin) who just happens to be the elder brother of the guy his girlfriend dumped him for. Now there might be two schools of thought about this being either a darkly comedic look at art and artistry, or just a prurient exercise in excessive female (only) nudity. I'm not sure I cared though because I found this film to be glacially paced and just plain dull. The narration, provided by the nondescript Biggerstaff vacillated from the self-indulgent to the downright boring and the writing makes no effort to ingratiate this introspectively hormonal voyeur with anyone watching. It's not erotic, it's not sexy - it's remarkably sterile.