This review may contain spoilers
PLEASE give "Silent Sparks" a chance, despite the low rating.
This was an excellent, slow-burn, slice-of-life short film.It's not a BL in the usual BL sense. More of a LGBT film, but.....not exactly that, either. It slightly reminded me of the multi-award-winning movie, Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985).
I think in its short screen time (~1 hr 15 mins), "Silent Sparks" squeezed in a lot of character development, and the short plot - while not containing much "action" - was exactly as long as it needed to be.
The two main actors were very good. They had a real connection, and both did a great job portraying two small-time criminals with some unexpressed feelings between them, but hopeless futures.
Although at the end.....in a weird, twisted way, perhaps there was hope for them after all?
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I've read a lot of the comments from others on here, and it seems like a lot of people say it was "boring" or "lacking in development because it was too short."
But I have watched quite a few gritty Asian films, both full length and short, and IMO some of the most interesting ones were much more spare than other films, and almost completely devoid of what some would call "charm." The casts are always very small in number, and the actors spend the length of the movie showing us their seedy lives, with only a few - if any - moments of humanity and "just-out-of-reach" potential for happiness.
That, to me, is what "Silent Sparks" is - a brief interlude in the main leads' lives that ends up leaving the viewer feeling forlorn and frustrated, because the characters are stuck in a never ending cycle with no real opportunities to step away from that and take a different path. It's not meant to be full of action, and it's not constructed in such a way that we get a deep dive and well-rounded picture of what happened in the past, and what might happen in the future. We only get to see the present moments, and the actors' superb character portrayal.
I really enjoyed "Silent Sparks," and I hope others will give it a chance.
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