Cashback
Studio: Magnolia
WorkNameSort: Cashback
Possibly the nadir of that post-Trainspotting, British pseudo-hipness category, Cashback feels like a kinetically stylized memoir but with none of the distinction. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff, a porno actor’s pseudonym if there ever was one), an amateur artist who’s just been dumped by his girlfriend and is going through a withdrawal period that Nick Hornby could script better in his sleep. He gets a late-night job at a supermarket, and in between picturing all the hot customers with their clothes off, he falls for the check-out girl. Despite the film’s tedious overlength and presence of obnoxious voice-over narration, there’s not a single three-dimensional character in it. But we are treated to lots and lots of naked breasts and vaginas, with nearly every female character treated as a fetishized sex object for the protagonist’s (read: director’s) perverse pleasure. Oh, but it’s OK, because Willis is looking at the bodies from an ‘artisticâ?� perspective, and this sensitive dreamer is trying to getting over a bad breakup. Boo-effing-hoo. Vile, patronizing and without an original joke to call its own, Cashback ends, pitifully enough, with the kind of deus ex machina that would insult a 10-year-old.
This article appears in Aug 8-14, 2007.