An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, on first impression often too busy being busy, endeavors to bowl you over with its postmodern scope. A carefree amalgam of narrative, documentary, and several styles of animation, it can be mistaken for an undisciplined tour-de-force. With its stentorian second-person narration (Reg E. Cathey from The Wire), self referential film-within-a-film, stop-action, inner monologues, asides, collages, freeze frames, subtitles and intertitles, is this a student film ready to go over the edge any moment?
Yet for the most part it reins in its excesses admirably. A soulful street-wise tone emerges, antithetical to all the intellectual semi-hogwash that goes down. What we have is not so much a braggart epistle to a lost love (Nimik Mintor who’s prominently in the film) as an endearing tribute to the same that is paradoxically heightened by all the jibber-jabber.
In what often still feels like a way-too-brainy exercise, kudos must be given to the film’s technical marvels, which are plentiful, and to its heart, which shines through the density. Director Terence Nance juggles his genres with an ambition that’s scarily impressive for a first film. He almost bowls you over.
3 1/2 Wacky Art Films (out of 5)