Practice

A charming comedy of awkwardness, Practice is not so much fixed to one location as a single address. Though 'single address' doesn't just cover a journey that barely makes it from sofa to close but the process of saying "hey" through a dating app. Screened as part of the Young Scottish Filmmakers competition at Glasgow's 2023 Short Film Festival it was awarded a special mention by the jury of previously short-listed entrants. They "really loved its creativity within constraints," and were right to do so.

Jack Heydon's film puts him into deep multihyphenate territory, he writes, directs, edits, and one suspects it's from his own DVD collection that moments of Sandra Bullock romantic-rehab vehicle 28 Days and French whatever-wave classic Betty Blue come from. Set in, and showing to, a Glasgow crowd meant some of us could probably figure out which flat it was filmed from, but the most important 'where' is in our protagonist's head. As it had received a special mention it was shown at the festival's closing ceremony, and it was clear that it struck a chord with the audience.

As a short-listed film-maker Heydon will have (or will be due to have) received a sum of some couple-hundred quid, and will get the opportunity to act as a judge for next year's competition. Given how much he's been able to achieve in Practice one can only hope that a budget that'd cover the cost of those DVDs some 55 times over (including S+H) will give him the opportunity to use those skills again.

In a film this small it's hard to talk about events without risk of spoilers. It's fair to say that something tests the main character's solitude, and he correspondingly tests means to escape it. While he might find some of his attempts wanting that's not the case for the rest of us watching. While Heydon is not the first to make tonsorial or equivalent sacrifices for film, as someone who's not been near scissors or a razor in years I salute not just his dedication but his commitment to depicting unfortunate interstitial consequence. It's rare to see the near-naked intimacy here outwith a documentary context. Indeed, the parallels with another GSFF award winner, Clean, went past the presence of porcelain.

Drawing from the potential for miscommunication in modern mating rituals, Practice shows no small measure of skill. While whole genres are still engaged with the struggle of working around mobile telephony, the film manages to find intimacy from devices powered by USB-C, or at the very least where the wings of desire meet FireWire. I might be showing my age and telephone OS preferences with those, but by Jove lightning can strike twice. It might owe more to Mercury than Aphrodite, but by borrowing from other romantic films and the structure of its (almost literal) framing of those moments, it serves as a reminder of the old adage that good artists borrow but great artists swipe (right).