HipBeat (2020) Film Review
Building characters isn’t an easy task. Unless you’re an experienced playwright, a construction is necessary, and it’s not only writing about your characters. You have to give them a past, a motivation. You must be prepared to solve their conflicts as well as describe what drives them to do what they do.
After all, they’re the ones who drive your film towards the end, and if the viewer can’t connect then who are we supposed to accompany? A personal goal or objective? A vision that’s shallowly placed in the shoulders of someone who can’t transmit an emotion as clear as love?
In HipBeat, Angy is the sole character. He’s a young man who has become a political activist, and he even sacrifices a family relationship to follow his personal endeavor. He doesn’t take long to access an underground world of free love and open sexuality that instantly makes him search for the ultimate love in a queer environment where everything is accepted. Or at least it should be.
Angy’s girlfriend is an open minded girl. But he’s not that open minded when Angy starts crossdressing. This leads to a dispute that sets Angy on a path in which he questions himself and his agenda.
However, where does this translate to what we saw of Angy’s intent at the beginning? Of course, there’s a sense of community and social struggle that is perfectly synchronized with the identification of a minority group that’s fighting the system. But HipBeat isn’t a documentary. This is the story of a young man whose personal vision is an enigma that’s vaguely solved if you can stand the film’s lousy scripting to the end.
The film’s full of experimental shots and these go well with a great soundtrack that’s constantly evolving, but it isn’t clear how this connects with Angy’s objective. It would have been great to add a bit of self-awareness to Angy. Perhaps it would have worked to find out some other things about the character and not only stay in the gender and sexual aspects. Personally, I don’t think those made Angy. It went beyond this.
Yes, love is able to solve everything and any kind of love is revolutionary to a society that’s keen on being conservative. But this is not well reflected in HipBeat. Instead we get a character whose mood travels from one side to another and doesn’t even care to explain what’s the issue at hand. If we had to solve this by ourselves, then I’m sorry. I just wasn’t able to.
HipBeat is a dramatic and immersive look to the Berlin queer community. Sadly, it was through the eyes of a young man whose limitations are clear, but his drive is unfocused. Samuel Kay Forrest writes, directs and stars in HipBeat. Being a single man’s job, I would have expected a little bit more insight and less fancy shots of Berlin at night.
