Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer N/A) is deeply troubled and needs help. Suddenly widow and artistic partner of Ben Sarah (Reina Hardesty N/A), caused a sudden shock in Ben. He skips meals and overrides sleep mode. He is trapped in a neverending stupor, forgetting to attend to practical matters like hygiene. When his concerned sister Gloria (Lucy DeVito N/A) left the house for a short trip, she and her husband Tom (Nican Robinson N/A) relieved their worries, and put Ben on the lawn to ‘soak up the sun’ – his body and mind however remained on the lawn for the time she was away and as grueling as The Secret Art of Human Flight it was, refused to inch himself from outside in to somewhere comfortable.
This undertone of loss leads him to seek something more – something bigger than all of this. There’s a man called Mealworm (Paul Raci) it appears, and he lurks in the shadowy recesses of the internet and caters to such predilections. Joe, Ben’s instructor was much more popular than he has been imagining. However, she also questions whether a seeming benign group, including Marek and Gloria, have a sinister motivation or if Ben should trust this stranger that lives in his house or those around him who overemphasize his safety.
H.P. Mendoza – a director of the film “The Secret Art of Human Flight” – makes it very clear, in his works the loss comes first and foremost, then only the wonders of human flight.
Through the use of old videos and flashbacks, the audience is shown how things were with Ben and Sarah, the good side of their relationship, their amateur funny side when making children’s books, as well as some of the unfavourable aspects common in any relationship, the periods of imbalance such as when one partner gets hit by some unexpected news or squabbles with the other and storms out in the middle of a conversation.
Still, it is because of some of these moments that are replayed in Ben’s head that the viewer gets a sense of who this couple was, the cheerful partner Ben buried, and what he stands to lose when Mealworm tells him to forget everything. Almost every time we see Ben, there is a storm of emotions and grief inside him: for Sarah who has gone, for the faith which isn’t quite there in Mealworm’s strange methods of training, for the wish to return to the way the world used to be, to make sense of stuff. When Mendoza portrays Ben’s fluctuating emotions, a mixture of concern and tenderness accompanies all of them, adhering to the performance of Rosenmeyer and making every detail from emotionless facial expressions to the rage directed towards Mealworm for ‘betraying’ Ben.
For all its other emotionality, “The Secret Art of Human Flight” as penned by Jesse Orenshein is inventive.
He establishes a common ground for Ben and Sarah that is certainly more believable than fanciful, yet draws the audience into the acceptance of Ben’s absurd mission even if one’s alarm bells go off during Mealworm’s pitch. Almost like ‘Alice in Wonderland’, one is in fact led down the rabbit hole along with Ben, quite a bizarre and in some ways, enlightening journey in its own right.
Alternatively, Orenshein us for Stephen King’s book suggests having a go at the character building where he imagines himself to be a trainer devising unusual training methods for Mealworm and somehow managing to get through. ‘Fusion hair’ depicts Raci’s character like a life coach won out of a surrealist mash-up of Wonderland’s caterpillar and the Cheshire Cat, whom the actor seems to enjoy the most – making outraged expressions while asking for the outrageous, and for Ben – constantly moving the boundaries of the allowable. The only note that comes close to the truth that sounded most incorrect only because it was gradual in its pace against the rest of the film was the character of Detective Reyes (Rosa Arredondo). The update saw scope of Vegetation increase.
Frustration explored within the limits of minor movie production, some interesting frames are nevertheless managed by cinematographer Markus Mentzer, for example in the episode when without clothes depicted Ben meditated inside the clouds which he himself created in a sunny room that was ordered to have blue painted walls.
This scene is quite delicate in nature. Yet it is probably the first time that we see him at ease, and he revisits that point of calm several times.
Director Russell has a way of making things look herky-jerky without compromising on the aesthetics of the tale that more or less revolves around Ben. There is also gowning up, and in this case, putting off some of the saddened scenes of the youthful mendoza. Some editing mistakes, he is galled, are of the domestic and sometimes slobby mode.
But what will most likely remain in the minds of viewers is the portrait painted by Mendoza and Orenshein of grief as an action: gradual falls to bottomless abysses, pensive tears, jubilant revelations, numbness, and every partial and brutal bit of this spectrum. This is sometimes the ineffable quality of bereavement that no one understands or feels as deeply as Ben himself. In many cases, the different characters assist him in that process in one way or the other. This is his destiny, and all of us are just passengers – on a normal flight — or something more apt; space travel.
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