Near the end of “Oeuvre, Unfinished,” a film created by Business graduate student Madeline Sun Woo Kim, protagonists Anna (graduating Music, Theatre & Dance senior Alyssa Melani) and Leo (graduating Music, Theatre & Dance senior Atticus Olivet) sing to each other in front of a campfire. The screen is mostly dark, their faces lit only by the flames. Leo plays the guitar while they sing quiet lines from “This Is It,” a song composed by Evan Chung (graduating College of Literature, Science and the Arts senior) and Bredan Dallaire (Music, Theatre & Dance class of 2025) for the film, broken by laughter. The scene transitions to a dance sequence. Leo and Anna remain the only subjects in the darkness. The dance is slow. They simply hold each other in the firelight.
In the film, which premiered on April 19 at the Michigan Theater, this is the most moving scene. It draws out what the entire film aims for: the connection between two people who meet by chance — first in an art gallery in front of the fictitious painting after which the movie is named and then similarly in parallel universes. The campfire scene takes place in one such parallel universe.
The film is an impressive debut for Kim. The production and music by rising Music, Theatre & Dance senior Ryo Kamibayashi both help, but Kim’s writing and the actors who bring it to life are what make the film meaningful. Melani and Olivet’s chemistry is as believable when they first meet in front of the painting as when they play an 1800s artist and his muse. It is also there when they play modern-day high school students telling each other about their dreams (which feature the same artist and muse dynamic). Kim’s writing gives this chemistry somewhere to run with lines that are often sweet and funny. Anna shyly tells Leo that she thinks there’s a reason she is drawn to the painting. Leo responds with a question: Does she think that, if everything happens for a reason, there’s a reason they met? She is caught off guard but admits that there must be. They build a little world of these exchanges — the words of two people who hardly know each other but feel inexplicably like they should.
The film is not rife with drama or conflict, but it doesn’t need to be. It reads more like a painting itself than a typical narrative. It is a picture of Anna and Leo, of their worlds and their love.
I must return to the campfire scene because the film never succeeds at painting this picture more beautifully than in that scene. The scene is simple, no fanfare. Leo and Anna are the only people there. They aren’t in a public space. They aren’t in a city. They aren’t having an adventure. They aren’t running under streetlights yelling to each other and lighting up the night with their joy and love. It is a gentle, quiet, isolated moment, just between the two of them. The outside world may as well have ceased to exist. Kim trusts their love to hold its own without a big set piece. Instead, it consumes the scene.
I consider it a mark of success if a film so viscerally depicts something as to make the audience deeply desire it for themselves. This could be a metric by which to weigh art about romance especially. Any good art about romance (or romance we are rooting for; we can ignore any stories of misguided love here) should make the audience long for what the characters have — to have someone you love as much as they do, to be with someone who would sing with you by the fire. With this scene, with Melani and Olivet, with this film, that is what Kim has done.
Daily Arts Writer Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.