Grape Soda

short film by Justin Robinson

This is my first short film analysis/review or what ever you want to call it.

First of all, make sure you watch the short film first if you are going to read this article.

A marriage, broken by death, is kept alive by the memories held through grape soda.

First thing that caught my attention were the performances. They are very subtle, but full of emotion, specially from the main character (Bobby). He is a very introvert man, even shy. He tries from the very first moment to hide what he is feeling. He politely says the guy that just slept with his wife to get out of the house. He never yells, he stays calm.

From that moment on, the emotions start to build up inside the character. The scene with the vending machine is amazing. It portrays, in a great and tragic way, how the small things are the ones that makes us snap. It’s one of those days when everything that can go wrong, goes wrong and still he tries to contain the emotions. He is not fighting with a vending machine, he is fighting with himself and his demons trying to break him.

Then he snaps, alone in his car, but it’s not until he is in his house, smelling the sweater of her child that he finally breaks and understands his true problem.

Let’s get into that.

I loved the use of objects to build up dramatic tension. The story shifts beautifully from an a affair to a broken couple dealing with one of the most painful situations, the death of a child, and it does it beautifully just through objects.

We start with this small hints of a child, a blanket in the background. We have the suspicion that there is a child, but we know nothing about it.

Then, moments later, the first hint of the grape soda. It looks weird that this man is almost getting drunk on soda.

Then, this frame is beautiful:

It tells us so much and it only last, like, 3 seconds. The color purple is obvious. The color of his shirt and a small box behind him. If we look close to the picture, there is Claire holding a grape soda bottle. The director is building up the importance of the grape soda, not just with the soda itself, but with the colors around Bobby.

Now we see Claire, and together with this other scene we know that the problem is not about the wife, but about Claire. There are no pictures of the wife, just the child.

Still, we are not going to know the depth of the pain until 5 minutes later.

In between those moments we have the vending machine, were he is trying to get grape soda. Then the lunch box with Claire’s name and more grape soda.

There are very small hints of where this fixation comes from, but we don’t know for sure until the last moment of the movie. Then, whith the montage of Clair playing and drinking grape soda you finally connect the dots and see how important it was. Then you can look back to the moment when Bobby spills the soda on top of the divorce papers, realizing that he needs to move on. He finally realizes what he has been doing wrong all along. He finally knows for sure what he wants to and what he needs to do.

And that final frame is just beautiful.