About.com Rating



Some fantasy stories are about the spectacle, saturating the screen with visual confection; many are about the lushly supernatural worlds they build, or the surreal journey to get there and back. Cashback is something else. It's a film that enchants because it has a story to tell and a fascinating way to tell it. Sean Ellis, who developed this feature film from his award-winning short of the same name, never loses grasp of two rare insights: first, that fantasy, as something inherently human, is most effective when presented naturally; and second, that it's not the dreaming that matters, but the ideas dreams contain.

Beautiful Story

Cashback tells the story of Ben (Sean Biggerstaff, who played the Quidditch captain Oliver Wood in the early Harry Potter films), an art student who, after a painful breakup with his girlfriend Suzy (Michelle Ryan), finds that not only can't he stop thinking about her, he can't even sleep.

As his insomnia stretches into days he has more and more difficulty filling up the dolorous new hours added to his life; finally he takes an overnight shift at a supermarket. The other employees all have ways of their own to deal with dragging time; Ben, oddly enough, finds that his way is to stop it altogether, allowing him an endless moment to savor the still beauty of the female form and capture that beauty in his sketches. At first he draws the patrons in the market, but increasingly he becomes fixated on Sharon (Emilia Fox, now playing Morgause on Merlin).

The story is the star of this film, and Ben's narration is a smooth and sure journey through what makes Ben see the world the way he does.

That journey takes us back occasionally to a few formative moments in Ben's childhood awakening to feminine beauty (and those skittish about nudity should be advised that unadorned feminine beauty is on full display throughout this film), and while Ellis is in no rush to dispense with flashbacks to get back to the "real" story, none of these forays lingers past the length it needs to be.

Natural Storytelling

More importantly, the film tells the story it wants to tell, not the story imposed by formula or focus groups. It feels organic, and its humor doesn't arise from jokes but emerges naturally from the defining characteristics of the characters and the byplay between them. (I laughed straight through the whole movie, more than I have at some comedies I've seen recently.) There's a moment partway through the film in which a particular mystery character suddenly emerges (at the soccer match), and the laws of Hollywood films would demand a revelatory payoff for that character at the end of the story; but that moment in the story serves an entirely different purpose, making possible a later moment of clarity for Ben. Ellis is more interested in conceptual destinations than in the mechanics of the fantasy.

Cashback is also beautifully realized visually. The cinematography and editing are fantastic. Every place in the film looks perfectly ordinary and yet a pleasant place to be: normal does not have to mean gritty and damaged. There are some lovely transitions: sometimes you see a pan across a scene that takes you from this place in the present into a different place in the past, and you're distracted because its arty and gratuitous; here they integrate the flashback into the scene, a visual reminder that the past moment is part of the present for the character who lived through it. There's a gorgeous scene shift in which Ben falls from a failed telephone call on the payphone in his hallway into his bed from overhead: arty, yes, but utterly charming.

Comfortable Performances

All of this is not to slight the acting, which is outstanding: Sean Biggerstaff should be famous for this film. His relationships and insomnia haunt him and yet inspire him; Biggerstaff deftly shows how his capacity to freeze time is important only because it allows him to look deeper into the beauty in the world around us, especially the human form, that is essentially the artist's gift. Ben's fascination with capturing this beauty is soaked into Biggerstaff's performance.

Emilia Fox has the interesting task of playing an ordinary woman who stands out as special simply because she has a dream that she's slowly working toward achieving. She somehow manages to hide her striking beauty, which has a much to do with the energy in her face, until she starts to become interested in Ben -- which is all the more interesting as Ben's sketches reveal the beauty she suppresses.

The rest of the cast is made up of oddballs designed to highlight Ben's particular sensitivity, but while their peculiarities are played for laughs they're not overembellished: if you took an overnight gig at a supermarket these are, in fact, the people you'd meet, partly created by and partly creating the surreal sunless world of the graveyard shift. There's no need to make them hostile or cruel -- they're just blokes trying to get by by having a laugh.

There should be more fantasy films like Cashback, because we need to be reminded that not only do we not need to go to a land of dragons to engage in fantasy, we also should not spurn our own fantasies, but use them to discover what's missing in our lives.