Film review: Life in a Day

If you were to film a single random day of your life and turn it into a movie, how many people would actually want to see it? Let's be frank: Unless you were Gaddafi or Prince, you'd bore everyone half to death. Get people the world over to record themselves, however, and it'd be a different story or, to be exact, thousands of different stories. Life in a Day is such a tapestry - a ground-breaking, if inevitable, snatch of the world we live in, warts and all.

The joint baby of YouTube, Kevin Macdonald and Ridley Scott, Life in a Day pieces together raw footage (sifted from some 80,000 individual clips originally) of people going about their lives on July 24, 2010, to create what is effectively the world's biggest collage. It was a task likened by the chief editor to "being told to make Salisbury Cathedral, and then being introduced to a field full of rubble."

With such a gargantuan cast making the final cut, Life in a Day risked being an uncontrollable beast, yet clips are segued cleverly into the next, while editorial savvy picks out the most endearing characters for repeat viewings.

Certainly, the recurring figures stick in the mind, and that we've only witnessed the tiniest sliver of a single day in their life doesn't stop us feeling a connection. One man cycling around the world observes with incredible nonchalance, "I've been struck by cars six times, five times surgery. There are so many careless drivers in the world." He then launches into an essay on the various sizes of fly. Sounds weird, but it's actually touching stuff.

Prepared questions serve to bulk out the concept of a narrative (along with a dawn-to-dusk chronology): "What do you carry with you?" (to which one woman proudly pulls out her handgun); "What do you love?" prompts one man to admit the most joyous moments of his life are spent bombing down the motorway at 150 miles an hour; "What do you fear?" elicits a young girl to ponder, "What if God isn't real, and we're just going to lie in the ground, dead forever?"

A montage of life in its truest sense, Life in a Day shows all the aspects that any one day might throw up. Simple pleasures are found as a father and son eat burgers in a car; horror unfurls in front of people's eyes when Love Parade goes tragically awry and partygoers are crushed to death; one man's marriage proposal is accepted and another man's advances are spurned. Every kind of emotion is woven into the film's fabric.

The visuals themselves are a veritable hodge-podge of the grainy stuff you'd expect from user-generated YouTube content, along with first-rate camerawork that wouldn't be out of place on the National Geographic Channel. Yet you never question this juxtaposition; it's a jigsaw that somehow fits.

Being the revolutionary project it is, Life in a Day is not without its imperfections - subject matter acting up for the camera, for example. When this happens, it causes the film's most grating moments; a mother hamming it up as she wakes up her teenage son: "It's gonna be a looong day, as most are," she smarms. In another clip, a rotund husband forces his poor wife to feed some seagulls, ordering, "Walk out into them and make a good video." Surely "good videos" like this undermine Life in a Day's attempt to portray everyday life.

As far as teaching us anything about ourselves, the film leaves us to draw our own conclusions. Some might be inspired to run outside and converse with strangers on the street; others won't. Thank God, though, this documentary isn't varnished with some kind of pseudo-poetic narration (surely they toyed with the idea of using Morgan Freeman?).

Life in a Day is a venture that could have gone horribly awry, but has instead transpired to be a largely riveting film. It makes all home movies look pretty self-indulgent, too.

Will Noble can be reached at
wnoble@praguepost.com