On a hot summer afternoon Kate and Mandy are sitting beside an outdoor pool. They briefly exchange banter and talk about their friend's breasts and feeling sexy. One has braces on her teeth while the other wears plastic sunglasses and tosses her hair like a model. Below them Ruth is trying to break the 3 minute record for holding her breath at the bottom of the pool.
I'm of the mind that shorts should have something to say, or be funny, or be frightening or just be something! I dislike shorts that don't have any point, or bury their point so deep that you need to sit in a dark room for an hour afterwards to try and extract some meaning from it. This is one of the latter. The story doesn't appear to be going anywhere - in fact the main action is one of the girls trying to decide if she should go an ice-cream or not. The dialogue is little more than childish banter and doesn't do anything other than let us know why Ruth is at the bottom of the pool and give us some idea of what stage of their lives Kate and Mandy are at.
As the title implies, this is only 3 minutes long and you do feel like nothing happens. Underneath the lack of action exists the idea that Kate and Mandy are entering puberty and are growing up, they are on the side with their concerns and worries. Meanwhile Ruth is still in the quiet childish world of the underwater, she is still and doesn't have any worries. The film tries to contrast the difference between the side and being underwater with the gap between childhood and puberty. However it doesn't seem to have anything to say about this gap and just watching it there really isn't anything that would make you think that this message is being conveyed. Maybe if they'd made it 3 minutes longer and added more dialogue to let us see into the girl's characters more then it would have been clearer and more rewarding.
The girls are all good, but have little dialogue of any substance to deliver. Overall, this takes an interesting subject, sets out an interesting concept but manages to hide it all so well by not developing the symbolism to a point where it becomes meaningful. I don't know how a 3 minute film manages to be a major disappointment, but this is.
