Liquid Love (2013)
★ — Liquid Love (2013)
The things I'll watch in the name of filling out a map. My A-Z World Movie Tour has taken me to some unexpected corners of the globe, and when it came to the Seychelles, the pickings were, let's say, slim. Slim enough that I ended up on Vimeo at midnight watching eight minutes of a woman swimming underwater. That's Liquid Love. That's the whole thing.
I want to be fair here. There's a version of this that could work. Underwater photography can be genuinely gorgeous, and pairing it with a jazz soundtrack is a reasonable enough idea on paper. The problem is that "reasonable on paper" is about as far as this gets. You watch a woman glide through water. The jazz plays. More gliding. More jazz. The water looks fine. The jazz sounds fine. Nothing happens. Time passes. You begin to question your choices.
It reminded me a little of Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), in the sense that both ask you to sit with a minimal visual experience and find something in it. The difference is that Jarman's film is loaded with meaning, memory and grief underneath that single blue frame. Liquid Love gives you ripples and a saxophone, and then it gives you more ripples. The patience required isn't rewarded with any great insight or beauty that justifies the ask.
The one genuinely interesting moment comes in the last twenty seconds, when the film briefly touches on some Seychellois folklore. And honestly? I sat up. There's something there. A fragment of culture, a hint of mythology, something with roots and texture. If the whole eight minutes had been built around that idea, exploring the folklore through the underwater imagery, finding a connection between the legend and the landscape, I'd have been properly engaged. Instead it's tacked on at the end like an afterthought, a post-credits scene for a film that didn't earn one.
I genuinely can't tell whether this is a short film, an art installation piece, or something a film student put together for a course. None of those possibilities would surprise me. It's freely available on Vimeo, which tells you something about its commercial ambitions, and at eight minutes it's not exactly a major time investment. But those eight minutes still feel longer than they should.
One star, and most of that is for the twenty seconds of folklore that made me wish I was watching a different, better film about the Seychelles instead.
The tour continues. The map fills. The suffering is sometimes real.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2013 | Watched: 2025-09-02
Related on Movies With Macca
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
