Safety not Guaranteed - quirky, American, indie

Been looking forwards to Safety not Guaranteed for over a year now.  When I first heard about it, a tale of a reporter who goes in search of a man who put an ad in the paper looking for time travel buddies, it sounded like exactly the sort of film you want to seek out in a tiny art house cinema to watch with a small cadre of 5 other film nerds.  As it happens Berkshire doesn't really do arthouse cinemas, so DVD via Lovefilm (or possibly Amazon these days) it is.

The story is exactly as billed.  In quirky Seattle a reporter and his two interns go to a remote location on the pacific coast to investigate a man (Kenneth) who has put the mysterious ad in a local paper asking for a companion to travel in time with him.  The advert states that you will have to bring your own weapons, your safety is not guaranteed and that he has done this only once before.  The lead reporter Jeff has an alternative agenda though, which is to hook up with an old girlfriend of his and try to get nerdy Indian intern Arnau laid.  So it falls to the constantly-baffled Darius to do the real work of the story.  As she investigates Kenneth though she finds that he is more than just a conspiracy theory weirdo with a strange fixation on time travel.  As the mystery of what is really going on deepens, Darius struggles to work out who is telling the truth, and if Kenneth really can do what he says.

One of the best bit about Safety not Guaranteed is that the film is very coy about its own genre.  Although the premise promises a touch of science fiction, the film is pretty much a quirky comedy that relies on the interplay between the 3 reporters to get its kicks.  When the story occasionally and suddenly brings you back into possible scifi territory, it's jarring - but in a very good way.

The only real criticism I have is that it was clearly filmed on a very low budget on a digital medium that wasn't really capable of dealing with the low lighting they wanted to use.  There is a least one scene when everything becomes very blocky as the digital technology struggles to cope with the night time setting.  I don't think there's any real excuse for this, since even though it's an independent production the film-makers are hardly unknowns in the field and should be capable of using suitable equipment.

Such technical nit-picks hardly detract from the fact that this is a very funny film.  It feels a bit like the American Office, constantly reaching for gags and one-liners with plenty of well-timed pauses.  More often than not it hits the mark.  The characters are fun and interesting, and there's even a time travel theme going on in the subplots about longing for the past, what you might do if you could change the past, taking opportunities and making the most of your youth.  To discuss the film's ending would be to court accusations of spoilers, but there is certainly room for debate as to what was really going on.  And at only 80 minutes too, there's literally no reason why you shouldn't watch this excellent piece of independent American film-making.