« Bring this form to the ordering office by the agreed time. This is important! » 

It is past midnight and Walter, a thirty-something worker, is having a nightmare in which he is chased by a werewolf. Waking up with a start, he hears howling coming from outside. The next morning, arriving at work tired and in a bad mood, Walter is ordered by his boss to bring a form containing a list of supplies to the ordering office before the scheduled time. He therefore rushes over to the building where this office is located.

With Walter’s bad day, Dean Attari offers a slapstick-style film reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s great years of cinema.

A successful style

Dean Attari is not the first to attempt to reproduce the style of 1920s films. Although it seems easy, many have broken their teeth on it. With Walter’s bad day, Attari succeeds brilliantly.

It all starts, of course, with a low-contrast black and white. For the effect to work, one must fight that urge to create a high-contrast image that would disrupt the viewers. In addition to the black and white image, the director thought to add film defects, such as lines and white dots appearing in a disordered fashion.

The hardest part is integrating certain jerky movements without making it look like mere camera glitches. Once again, Attari pulls it off. But for it to be stylistically successful, it was, of course, essential not to forget the slight speed-ups of the image. Added to this is music that seems straight out of the 1920s, which completes this stylistic success.

Funny and nostalgic

Walter’s bad day respects the form of Chaplin’s slapstick cinema. The story is simple, but it quickly turns into a mad dash through the mazes of the absurd. He therefore rushes over to the building where this service is located, on the top floor, only to discover that it has been transferred to another building in the neighborhood. Walter then runs to that building, but receives new changing information: the ordering department has been moved to another building, then another, and yet another.

Dean Attari orchestrates this endless bureaucratic manhunt with a sense of rhythm inherited from the great days of silent film. Will Walter continue to run from building to building? How long will this series of misadventures last? Each stage of his journey amplifies the situation comedy, transforming a simple formality into a Herculean ordeal where sweat vies with laughter. The director pulls off the gamble of breathing in a refreshing wave of nostalgia, reminding us that a man’s despairing face-off against the implacable machinery of everyday life has always been the ideal breeding ground for grand burlesque.