Chelsea Lupkin
Giancarlo Fiorentini and Jonathan Grimm’s 36 Questions is a short narrative inspired by the romantic social experiment developed by social psychology researcher, Arthur Aron, who managed to get two strangers to fall in love in his laboratory roughly 20 years ago.
Fiorentini and Grumm’s short follows Dr. Aron’s study, sans the seriousness, unlike many of the non-scripted videos that have popped up online in the wake of a New York Times article in 2015. To the filmmakers, the idea of writing a story about the two least compatible people trying the experiment was too tantalizingly hilarious to ignore.
“There was something very liberating about the entire short taking place in a sterile room between two characters, relying almost entirely on dialogue & performance to engage an audience.”
36 Questions assumes the structure of the original experiment, complete with a white-walled laboratory and two strangers… and no escape if things get a bit too awkward. The frustration and ridiculousness that ensues is both charming and aggravating. You’ll find yourself both laughing and feeling enraged as the questions move forward.
The minimalistic parameters of the setting made for a two camera setup that allowed the actors to improvise and ham it up as they pleased. Uniquely, this film does not rely on introducing new visual stimulation from shot to shot, but rather solely relies on the dialogue and performance of its actors to grab its audience.
Thankfully, the performances by Hannah Pearl Utt and Jon Gabrus are altogether captivating. Each actor offers their own flavor of comic relief that feels genuinely believable. Fiorentini and Grimm masterfully toy with the audience’s empathetic side. While most of the time you will sympathize with the more down-to-Earth, pessimistic female character, you’ll soon find yourself warming up to the obnoxiously narcissistically ill-informed male character.
Fittingly, this short was filmed in one of the UCB classrooms in Los Angeles. Fiorentini and Grimm acted as both Directors and Cinematographers, each manning a camera. Together they made a comical narrative that parodies the click-baity social videos online. 36 Questions was named by Splitsider as “Video of the Year” in 2015. You can check out more of their work on their website here.