'USERNAME: CARMEN' INCLUDES A COUPLE OF NODS TO DE PALMA
The upper image above is a shot from the new short film by Romain Lehnhoff, Username: Carmen (the title is a play, of course, on the title of Jean Luc Godard's First Name: Carmen), juxtaposed with a shot from Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill (itself informed by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho). Username: Carmen, which you can watch here, is a comedy created for Welcome To The Other Side, a short film festival contest that asked entrants to create a film of six-minutes or less, that involves the provided synopsis: "Following a misunderstanding, an individual walks into a room of absurdity (or nonsense)." The film also had to take place on May 23, 2014, and include "Un plan à l’envers."
Username: Carmen won Lehnhoff the top prize in the contest in Lille, France. The film is in French, with no subtitles, but you can follow it if you know it involves a guy (a student) who has an essay due the next day about the place of opera in today's music. Desperate, he finds a forum of opera lovers and asks them for help.
Thinking he's being clever while his girlfriend is in the shower, he uses the name "Carmen" as his user name, but finds that the forum is full of horny guys who only want to help "her" if he shares a picture-- he's about to tell them he's sorry, but he is a guy, but they insist on the pic as the only way they'll help "her," so he posts a pic of his girlfriend. After they go gaga over how "pretty" she is, etc., etc., the student gets ticked off by the whole thing, resulting in a hilarious act of rage, which his girlfriend walks in on at the end.
Aside from the above nod to Dressed To Kill, Romain also threw in a "quote" from De Palma's Mission: Impossible -- when the student types in his password, you'll see that the password is "JOB314."
Updated: Thursday, May 29, 2014 6:55 PM CDT
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