Take Me For a Ride

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a WLW movie that has a bigger disparity between the quality of its writing and the quality of its directing than Take Me For a Ride.

Take Me For a Ride is about the teenage Sara. You know Sara’s not like other girls because she has short hair and sometimes smokes cigarettes. Sara falls for the new girl, Andrea who returns her affections. The girls begin a romance which they keep secret under the guise of being “just friends.” However, eventually the truth of their relationship is revealed to the school. Sara also makes the decision to tell her parents about Andrea.

To start with the positive aspect, the directing and visuals in Take Me For a Ride are really stunning. This is doubly impressive given the fact that I don’t think this movie had much of a budget. It’s just that the director and director of photography are really good at their jobs. Take Me For a Ride is a consistently pretty movie to look at. There’s a light, airy feel to most of the scenes. Visually, the movie feels fresh, youthful and romantic.

Unfortunately, the story and dialogue doesn’t offer any structure to Take Me For a Ride’s admittedly stunning shots. This is an extremely cliche story with minimal dialogue and no emotional wallop. It genuinely feels like Take Me For a Ride is afraid of dialogue. Lots of the movie’s scenes are silent. This is totally fine, the visuals do most of the talking anyway. However, when there is a need for dialogue, Take Me For a Ride constantly punts. The lines are cliche and always at bare minimum to get the point across. No personality or plot development comes from dialogue which, in a movie that isn’t an actual silent movie is a problem.

Take Me For a Ride also seems to have no interest in major emotional conflict. Perhaps part of this an effort to depict a same-sex romance as an everyday occurrence but it ends up being boring. There’s no big lead-up to their first kiss, for example. Like everything else in the movie it feels matter of fact and the story quickly moves on to set up its next (admittedly stunning) shot of a tree or something.

The film constantly makes the baffling decision to quickly skate by depictions of negative emotion. Sara and Andrea disagree about keeping their relationship a secret. This lasts all of two sentences of dialogue and then cuts to a series of vignettes of them being happy and rolling around on a bed. When their relationship gets posted about on social media, they have a couple of lines of worry and anger but we never see anyone at school react to them. Indeed, the characters don’t have any scenes at school after this point. Finally, Sara comes out to her parents and that scene is largely off-camera. The movie depicts her awkwardly telling her parents that Andrea is her girlfriend and then it cuts to Sara crying in her room. The core emotional punch of that scene, the parents’ reaction is never depicted.

Part of the problem with Take Me For a Ride is also that it’s an awkward length. At 67 minutes, it’s not long enough for a feature film nor short enough for a short film. I think the film would’ve been better suited if it was 20 minutes longer or shorter. There absolutely is 20 minutes’ worth of dialogue and emotion Take Me For a Ride could’ve added to bring itself to 90 minutes. Alternately, they could have cut the movie down into a short film. Short film might have been a better medium for a film that’s more interested in mood and visuals than story.

Between its poor story but gorgeous directing, Take Me For a Ride averages out to well, average. It’s a short sit though still badly paced. But I can’t fully call the movie bad because it is so pretty to look at. Director and co-writer Micaela Rueda has a real flare for visuals. I would love to see more of her movies provided that she gets someone else to write the script.

Overall rating: 5.0/10

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