Review: LOOK AGAIN Is A Look Well Worth Taking

(The 22nd Annual Sedona International Film Festival, running from February 20th through February 28th, is featuring more than 160 films, including documentaries, features, shorts, animation and foreign films. The following is one of a series of reviews of selected films from the Festival.)

Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story:

The time to make up your mind about people - is never.

What if you could protect yourself from hurt? What if you could know in advance the true nature of a person? What if you had the ability to discern good from evil? How much pain might you avoid with such power! How much easier and risk-free life might be, but how void of passion and mystery it would be!

Are we immutable? Should our behavior today or the errors we once committed define who we are or how tomorrow we should be judged and valued by others?

Canadian writer and director Daniel O'Connor casts a laserlike lens on these existential questions in LOOK AGAIN, a whimsical and endearing film that has its central character looking at life through a mystical set of white-rimmed glasses and discovering that not all is as it seems.

For Amit Gupta (Anand Rajaram), a series of betrayals has soured him on life and brought him to the brink of suicide by train. His Chaplinesque struggle to determine what position on the tracks will guarantee finality is abruptly derailed by the divine intervention of two angels on probation, expertly and hilariously played by Darryl Dinn as Finley and Christian Potenza as Sebastian. If they succeed in setting Amit straight, the angels can redeem themselves in the eyes of their pugilistic chief (Eugene Clark) and advance to Level 1 Angel status. When the angels give Amit glasses with a unique power to discern good from bad, the blessing is a curse and a life lesson in disguise.

Amit's story is a roller coaster ride of relationship misdaventures as he becomes overly dependent on the glasses. Rajaram is a natural, his eyes capturing Amit's soulful innocence, vulnerability, and, indeed at times, his cluelessness.

The specs win him a new girl friend (Brittany Allen), a partnership with his best friend (Joel Keller), and a painful confrontation with reality personified by a sleazy self-promoter (Adriano Sobretodo Jr.). Ironically, in each of these relationships, they make him blind and stupid. However, in one of the most important relationships of his life, the lesson of the glasses offers a pathway to forgiveness and redemption.

More often than not, as Amit discovers, it's "nice to just discover people." Well, it's very nice to have discovered LOOK AGAIN, a well-acted and well-crafted, funny and poignant, eye-opening probe into the essence of human nature and the rocky road of relationships. Bravo!

Photo credit to LOOK AGAIN