What You Need (Short)
What compelled Nickolas Duarte, the writer and director of “What You Need,” to make the main character of his thoughtful tone poem a boy who is part monkey? I supposed it could be said that in doing so, Duarte is wanting to hit us over the head with the isolation and solitude the character feels in a way that having a regular child in the role just wouldn’t be able to convey. There’s some truth to that, I think, but at the end of this film’s melancholy four minutes, we find ourselves less concerned with the questioned I posed at the beginning, and more simply contemplating the sadness, and the loneliness, felt by the main character during these two days we watch him at home, and at school. We see snippets of him with his mother, reading to him before he goes to sleep, as well as her talking on the phone with his father, who has clearly disowned him because of his “condition.” That the character’s condition is never explained, let alone even acknowledged by any of the characters we see, is a strength of the film, making it more palatable for us to feel sympathy for the main character, and allowing us to put ourselves in his place, even for just a little while. Regardless of the reasons for Duarte’s artistic choice, that identification with the boy is reason enough for the film’s existence.
