Cashback, from the British fashion photographer and commercials/video director Sean Ellis, is a sleek little meditation on beauty, desire, love and time. Now and then, it's fairly sophisticated stuff.
At other nows and thens, however, this U.K. indie - which began life as an 18-minute short - is little more than a run-of-the-mill coming-of-age comedy, driven by hormones and hoary gags, with the usual assortment of sex-obsessed lunkhead pals, doofus coworkers, a stripper and the lot.
Some of this can be pinned on Cashback's barely post-adolescent protagonist, Ben Willis (Sean Biggerstaff, also known as Oliver Wood in the first two Harry Potter pics). He's a college art student who's split with his girlfriend and, suffering chronic insomnia, goes to work at an all-night supermarket. There, between moping and mopping up, he studies the (beautiful) women doing their shopping. Suddenly, like a still life (or a still photo), his subjects become motionless. Ben can move around, but the world surrounding him has stopped. He can undress the women and draw them like artists' models in a studio - except the artist here is a stockboy, working the soups and vegetables aisle.