An Emotional Tale Told In A Rather Objective Manner.

"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."-J Cocteau
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Pavel Ruminov's I'll Be Around (2012) is a very good film. This film is done in the Realist style. In fact, the portrayal of this poignant tale is so realistic, that it would be easy to confuse it as an actual documentary done in "real time", that is. a documentary that was recording real life events as they are transpiring.

This filmmaker was wise in his choice of a documentary style for this particular story concept, a young single mother who discovers that she is dying of cancer, and must find adoptive parents for her six year old boy before she dies. The story concept is emotionally weighty enough even when stripped down to its essentials, so extra dramatic, or thematic elements were unnecessary in the actual execution of this film. The very emotional nature of the basic story could have easily devolved into a real "tear jerker, sob story", super-melodrama in the hands of the wrong screenwriter, and the wrong director.

As such, the straight, documentary style of this film brought a certain dignity, a certain amount of class, and a lot of wary optimism to an otherwise weighty storyline.

The dramatic embellishments that are found in this film were achieved through an excellent mastery of the technical aspects of filmmaking itself. The editing is abrupt at appropriate times, suddenly transporting the viewer to a new scene, with an entirely different emotional ambience. The scattered focus on seemingly trivial inanimate objects, sometimes in a small montage brought moments of reflection, even meditation at appropriate points in the films. The lighting is used to great dramatic effect as well. Flashback editing at certain crucial points in the storyline was also utilized to great positive effect. The close up shots of the faces of the dying mother and young son brought very poignant moments to the storyline. Overall, the cinematography and editing in this film is just great, and appropriately done, given the nature of this unusual story concept.

In short, this filmmaker skillfully used his toolbox of cinematic techniques to create a real, tangible atmosphere in this story, an atmosphere that smoothly transitioned through phases of happiness, of resignation, of determination, of optimism, and finally of impending death.

This film is an effective exercise in cinematic storytelling. This film just "spins a good yarn", although it is a decidedly sober, and serious one. As an example of good storytelling, it spins out an emotionally heavy tale in an interesting, compelling, believable, and engaging manner.

There are some aspects to the storyline that left me unsatisfied, however. The film has no back story for the young mother, and why she didn't have close relatives that her son could live with after her demise. The film seemingly shows that the boy was adopted by strangers without any explicit assent by his biological father, or that the father ever even discovered what became of his son; this may be in line with the customs and laws of Russia, but it is decidedly strange, for instance, in the eyes of an American viewer.That the mother never actually tells her son that she is dying and that he is going to live with his "new"parents left me wanting at that point in the storyline. That the storyline skips over the mother's funeral altogether, and deprives the viewer of the son's reaction to his mother's death is a weak point in the storyline, at least for me.

Overall, however, these are all really trivial matters in an otherwise truly satisfying film, that portrayed this heavy story in a believable, and rather objective manner.

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