Name: Judas Kiss
Genre: Short
Released: 2003-10-14
Duration: 12 min
Rating: 5.6
Cast: Dominic Power

Superb, pure cinema with a delicious soundtrack

Filmed simultaneously with "Two Minutes After Midnight," "The Judas Kiss" picks up a background element of that film -- a lover's quarrel that we saw in the background of that comic short.

A handsome raven-haired stud kisses his boyfriend and goes off for beers. On his way back, he spots his blond, cute lover kissing a barechested, muscular black stud. What follows is a 10-minute sonic and visual meditation on betrayal.

As the "Scherza Infida" aria from Handel's opera, "Ariodante," plays (sung by countertenor David Daniels), the film attempts to portray the betrayal this kiss entails. Tongues are shown slipping in and out of mouths. The lovers' previous life together had its danger-signs (one was an intellectual and reader; the other a materialistic narcissist). The betrayed lover's eyes brim with tears. The betrayed lover reminisces about his beloved father, and how his father's death made him feel.

Over and over, melancholy images are shown -- rain, grey-granite buildings, meditative or longing looks. In slow motion, the lover confronts his cuckold. They break up in the club. The film ends in silence as the betrayed lover smokes a cigarette in bed, only the glowing ember on the tip remaining visible as the film fades to black.

It is a real tour-de-force of film-making. So often, sound film attempts to use musical cues to tell the audience how to feel. Over-cuing a film can be just as bad as having bad or no sound. "Forcing" the audience to feel through manipulative music can also destroy a film's impact.

But "The Judas Kiss" is different. It is a purely cinematic film, in that its use of music is upfront and intentional. Music is no background here; it is not intended to augment the visual. Rather, there are only two elements here -- the aural and the visual. And the aural is an integral part of the storytelling. Indeed, the film goes so far as to provide a subtitle translation of the Italian opera. In many ways, this film is almost an advertisement for opera, and the way that opera and operatic stories contain powerful emotions truths that are reflected even in non-operatic incidents, such as the break-up of two lovers in an Australian discotheque.

The visual elements in the film are also excellent. While eyes brimming with tears and longing looks out over rain-swept vistas are typical heartbreak images, there are other strong, inventive visuals here that provide new insight into the urban heart. I was particularly impressed with the use of cityscapes (notably, the courthouse building) to provide emotional cues about hardness of heart, justice, cold-heartedness and desolation that I've never seen before. The comparison of the lover's break-up to that of death is not new, but comparing it to the father-figure is. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, but it elicited a host of unique emotions from the audience (since it aroused different feelings in different viewers).

While not narratively effective, "The Judas Kiss" is a superb bit of film-making that deserves watching.

The short form refers to creative works characterized by their brevity and concise storytelling. Unlike full-length feature films, short films have a running time of less than 45 minutes, while TV shorts have a running time of less than 22 minutes.

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