Film Review

The Last Time, a short film directed by Christine Hooper, is about the struggles of quitting smoking.  A woman whose name was not portrayed in the film narrates her battle with smoking cigarettes. 

            The film opens with a scene between the main character and a random man standing at a bus stop.  The man is smoking a cigarette and when she sees that he is, she flips quickly into her sudoku booklet to try and distract her from the cigarette.  The narrator, who is also the main character begins to reminisce about her beginning interaction with a cigarette that started her on the path of addiction.

            She believed it made her look cool and gave her a new set of friends, yet it also gave her a way to escape from an awkward situation.  From there this escape plan turned into an addiction.  An addiction that she couldn’t get away from where cigarettes were the only thing she could think about and it began getting in the way of her social life.

            The narrator talks about how she began to quit, and the short film ends with her back at the bus stop with the man.  The bus drives by and pics up the man and when it leaves his half-finished cigarette is on the ground. The woman walks over picks it up and takes a draw from it saying, “one last time” before she runs away, and the screen goes black.

            The film was a great way to show how many people battle this addiction with cigarettes, with a fun twist to it.  The director turned it into this sort of love story between the main character and the cigarette and the way it was shot helped keep audience interested to some extent.

             There were some week points in the film however.  The way it was shot made it seem like a long commercial instead of an actual film, and with there being no name to the character it didn’t allow this sort of connection that some people would like.  The plot line of the “love story” seemed to be the only thing really going for this film.

            Adding a sort of comedic element to a not so comedic problem makes it something that people would want to see, especially people battling the same addiction.  Many people who smoke do not like watching commercials or videos on quitting because they would say “oh well it’s not that easy”.  However, this film showed that yes, it is not that easy, but it is a struggle that one can overcome.