Five Steps to Success Short Film Review

★★★

Directed by: #RyanWadeStott

Written by: #RyanWadeStott

Starring: #ChristienBartGittens, #JodiHutton, #SophieWhitebrook, #CarlBeech

Film Review by: Julian Gaskell

This short begins at a business motivational conference (The 5 Steps to Success) with the organiser (Jodi Hutton) preparing to introduce the next speaker who is due to arrive at any moment. Enter the room a sweating and dishevelled young man (Christien Bart-Gittens) wearing black leather gloves and clutching a suitcase. The organiser asks if he is Professor Kelly and he answers hesitantly that he is. Somewhat disorientated and totally unprepared he bluffs his way into the room with barely an eyebrow being raised.

He goes straight into the presentation and immediately slips into presentation mode freely adlibbing his way through the slides and even interacting expertly with the audience like a corporate speaking pro. He begins to go off script and goes into a short confessional speech about his life’s journey from a university graduate to a jewellery store thief, making the audience laugh rather than raise any alarm bells. He’s taken this mistaken identity opportunity as a means of temporary escape from what is presumed imminent capture. He continues with a long anecdotal speech about an inflatable orca whale he once wanted on holiday and his near death drowning experience. A metaphor about life, we can deduce. This is followed by a short tirade about how messed up the world is, much to it seems only the organiser’s disbelief. He begins pointing the finger at how religion, social media and powerful corporations in a new era of development have, instead of introducing better change, only continue to serve their own selfish purposes. He highlights the UK’s average wage and the high cost of living, giving an impromptu opinion about how if the average household struggles, it is therefore impossible for people below this average to exist. Whilst giving his speech he reveals a gun in his pocket, that again doesn’t seem to bother anybody in the audience, except the organiser, as they are wrapped by his confessional speech, that is ultimately saying why people like him turn to crime in the first place.

Written and directed by Ryan Wade Stott, produced and starring Christien Bart-Gittens, this filmmaking partnership have made a curious short that has a message about society it wants to make. If you can allow for the ease in which someone can breeze into a business conference wearing a pair of black leather gloves, that wouldn’t look out of place in an Agatha Christie murder mystery or how a motivational speaker can reveal he’s carrying a firearm without anyone so much as batting an eyelid, you’ll be able to empathise with this anti-hero’s fact driven monologue, quickly made-up on the hoof, that results in a different kind of de-motivational conference speech.