HIDE YOUR SMILING FACES by Daniel Patrick Carbone

With his debut feature film Hide Your Smiling Faces, Daniel Patrick Carbone can be added to the list of American filmmakers representing a new wave of stylish films often set in rural america where improvisation enhances realism and the environment is at once beautiful and haunting.

In the middle of an endless summer, two brothers living in rural America 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. But in the end, it's also down to the director's willingness to really capture an essence of childhood and its mixture of nostalgia as well as haunting realism and dramatic ambiguity that is widely unexplored in cinematic terms.