‘Sunny Side Up’ Short Review: Transcends Expectations while Providing Valuable Lessons [SFF 25]
“A writer gets past his writer's block by meeting a girl with whom he shares an exciting chemistry.”
That’s the premise of Satvik Bhat’s short film ‘Sunny Side Up’. Normally, a film operating under such a premise would be rife with the kind of exposition or humorous gags that have done nothing short to undermine both the attention span and creative introspection of most film audiences. However, on discussing the topic of exposition, Sunny Side Up lacks that element out of the sheer lack of dialogue it carries in it’s writing, which works when combined with a very playful musical score. That’s right. Not a word, and not even a visceral human expression is used to make a sound in Sunny Side Up. And yet, it succeeds in capturing a poetic playfulness most films squander out of a condescending and even patronizing attitude that audiences are often subjected to. Naturally this is the result of a cinema culture that has been bombarded with over saturated social media content that is fired at them at a 24/7 rate. Along with that, most film audiences have been flooded with an over indulgence of Superhero films and remakes that lack the sort of originality that is more interested in the kind of intellectual experimentation a short like Sunny Side Up achieves with an effortless use of European style romance music and a visual story telling approach that utilizes the close ups of the writer (Stephen Gray) and the girl (Nicole Wittusen ) with a masterfulness that makes one even more baffled to know that such a beautifully, well acted, and whimsically playful film was made under a budget of just five hundred Euros.
Along with this stylish component, Sunny Side Up succeeds in telling its story in a heartfelt way that denies any reliance on quick melodrama, or cheap antics. It just accepts the plight of the writer as well as his growing need to garner the attention of the girl that not only manages to help him take his mind off his writer’s block—which any writer can admit is the devil we really hate getting to know-but she also allows him to invoke a creativity that initially rewards him with a satisfaction that transcends the more personal desire of having him sit with her, which is only natural.
There is nothing natural about Sunny Side Up as it transcends traditional narrative expectations and provides a valuable lesson all creatives should aspire towards, and that is to trust the process. The young writer of Sunny Side Up isn’t some exotic Casanovic romance hero. He is an artist, and like any artist, he struggles to gather his thoughts to create something anyone of us fellow artists can say is worth pursuing, even at the expense of being psychologically stuck. However, one thing we often falter to, is that we often allow our passions to consume us so much, that it allows us to forget about all the other aspects of beauty surrounding us, and how if we obligate ourselves to miss that in favor of just simply completing an artistic vision that we ascribe a lot of personal meaning to, then we can miss something we’ll only realize was worth looking at more than just a computer screen.