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Beyond its light, entertaining, and gently comical façade, Pop-Up (written, directed and produced by Stuart McBratney) is in fact an important film which presents us with questions about some of the issues with which its numerous characters struggle in their emotional and interpersonal existences: the search of meaning in life, tolerance of difference, gender stereotypes, how to deal with loneliness and the loss of significant others, how (or even whether) we can ever learn from experience … All issues, these ones, also central to our psychoanalytic theories and therapeutic work.
Rather than dwelling on such vast themes, and getting lost in them, I shall limit myself here to briefly focus on two formal aspects of the film that seem to provide a valuable and original container for the exploration of these wider issues.
The first consists in McBratney's use of the narrative device of convergence: telling stories whose separate protagonists happen to eventually meet on the screen and interact with each other. Recounting a number of interweaving stories connected by characters who act as ‘bridges’ among them is a device also used to great effect in the ground-breaking Mexican films written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzales Iñarritu: Amores Perros , 21 Grams and Babel . In literature, a similar technique had been deployed by American writer Thornton Wilder in his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It begins: ‘On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below’ (Wilder 1927, p. 1) and proceeds to analyse their stories leading them to fatally end up at the same time in the same place. This novel seem to constitute the model to many so-called disaster movies, in which total strangers find themselves sharing the same destiny for the