Review of Hide Your Smiling Faces (2014) by Matt M — 25 Oct 2013
In the middle of an endless summer, two brothers are forced to come of age early when sudden tragedy strikes through the death of one of their friends. Hide Your Smiling Faces is not about the plot but its resulting emotions, which dictate its pace and hypnotic rhythm.
Carbone is excellent at employing a visual style that is at once nostalgic and unsettling also thanks to the use of landscape, which here gets the same attention as the character themselves. This style allows him to explore the darker side of coming of age drama through faithful representation of its boredom, its frustration and even a resulting state of depression.
We could also argue that death and adolescence has rarely ever been portrayed in such a realistic way, without slipping neither into pretentiousness nor into triviality. This, of course, could never have been achieved as powerfully without the kind of performances that Carbone is able to get out of his young cast.
This review of Hide Your Smiling Faces (2014) was written by Matt M on 25 Oct 2013.
Hide Your Smiling Faces has generally received positive reviews.
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