For such an emotionally effective film, Jason O. Silva’s “C’est Jane” might not sound like much at first.
For starters, it’s only four minutes long, all four of which take place in a concrete and cinderblock room. There’s no dialogue, but there is narration. It’s in French, even though the movie is intended for an English-speaking audience.
What the movie does include: subtitles, a riveting plot and a killer score.
The movie’s one character, Jane, is initially presented as some sort of dangerous assassin or secret agent. Through the narration and a series of images of Jane in different positions, though, viewers gradually learn an array of intimate details about Jane. It’s easy to forget she’s a killer at all.
“Basically, I love the kind of ‘shoot ‘em up’ genre, with secret agents and hired guns and that sort of thing, and so I wanted to introduce a character from the perspective of the human side of her,” Silva said. “It really has to do with less about the action and the intrigue, and more about the girl behind this façade.”
The most striking part of the film is details Silva chooses to reveal about Jane through the narration. Though they do develop her as a character, many of them are the sorts of things everybody assumes is true only of him or herself. To watch “C’est Jane” is to learn how little separates oneself from a killer.
“It is very much playing with a sort of physical and psychological remove,” Silva said, “where we’re really far away when we’re distant, but the more we get to know her, the closer we are, and the more her sort of two worlds collide.”
That the narration is in French is a brilliant move on Silva’s part. It contributes to an overall ambiguity about the setting of the film, and causes the narration to become a part of the soundtrack rather than a part of the story. Reading the subtitles allows the different shots of Jane to fade into your peripheral vision, making this film a visceral experience.
Jane is played by Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”), who does a great job conveying complex emotions with no dialogue and only several minutes of screen time.
“C’est Jane” will be showing upstairs in the Nickelodeon at 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 18.