I grade commercials in Tokyo so that I can afford to grade films for free. Skin is the whole job. Everything else is taste. I watch on a calibrated monitor at night with the room lights off, which my partner finds unbearable.
The blues here are not the usual blues. Somebody resisted the urge to push the night toward cyan and let it sit closer to violet, which means the sodium streetlight through the window reads as warm instead of sickly. Skin holds all the way into the shadow. I watched the balcony scene three times just to see where the highlight rolls off. Whoever graded this trusted the audience with darkness.
Concrete is very hard to make look warm and this manages it by grading toward yellow instead of the usual grey green. Skin against a grey wall at golden hour is a genuine test and it holds up. Small thing, but the interiors match the exteriors, which almost never happens on a short.
Shot on something with real grain, or graded to look like it, and either way the water reads as three different blues in twenty one minutes. The midday scene is blown out on purpose and it is the only time I have forgiven that. You feel the glare in your own eyes. The girl's face against the rock at minute fourteen is a still I would print and hang up.
Shot at sensitivities that should not hold and mostly they do. There is noise in the sky and the film leaves it in, which I respect, because cleaning it up would have made the whole thing look like a phone. Grain belongs to night. Somebody made a decision here and stuck to it for seventeen minutes.
Eighteen minutes, almost all of it in the forty minutes after sunset, and the film knows exactly how fast that light dies. There is a cut about halfway through where the exterior goes one stop darker between shots and it feels like the day giving up. I do not know if that was planned or if they simply ran out of sky. Either way it is the best moment in it.
