Distracted is an ironic policiers about Detective Henry Baker, who is assigned to a murder he has no interest in solving. He is neither old nor on some nihilistic descent, but suffers from the melancholy of one who is no longer engaged with the world around him.

Baker’s new partner, Derek Mountjoy, is in a very different place; if he doesn’t get a promotion his wife will leave him. Mountjoy displays the fastidiousness of a man who is terrified of losing what he loves. Distracted then, is a study of individuals and how they connect to the context within which their lives play themselves out. It is an observance of the mystery that is the human personality.

The universe of Distracted is one made-up of cinema, imagination and memory. It is a cinephile’s fantasy; the attempt to remember a film that never existed. Distracted is described as a “policiers” but it is not a French film. The word is co-opted here as a means of linking Distracted to a specifically European art cinema. Distracted is unashamedly a work of cinema, and created intuitively upon cinema’s history. It is also, however, anchored in the aesthetics of location filming, and all of the real world textures that come with it.

© 2019 James Devereaux