In a toast to Chris Nolan’s big weekend, I decided to start my Saturdays are for Sleepers series off with Following, Nolan’s first feature. Nolan made the 70 minute, black-and-white film on a shoestring budget of $6000 over the course of a year, filming on weekends. Even in 1997, when Following was made, $6000 was pennies. Nolan must have begged for and borrowed everything he could to get that film made. The cast and crew were his friends from the University College London Film Society. Following debuted in 1998 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Following tells the story of a greasy young writer who begins to tail people supposedly to find inspiration. One day the writer tails the wrong person and gets suddenly sucked down into a strange criminal underworld. With it’s moody black-and-white and eerie techno beats, Following is a prototypical neo-noir film. The camerawork is shoddy at times and the lighting is overly dim and uneven, but then again, Nolan was working with $6000 and not $200 million. 

Several of what have become Nolan’s stylistic trademarks first appear in Following. The timeline of the story, first of all, is disjointed and rearranged out of sequence much like in Memento, Nolan’s breakthrough thriller starring Guy Pearce. Nolan has certainly improved over time in his use of this technique. In Following, the transitions from scene to scene and from point to point in the story’s timeline are weak and confusing. Another trademark of Nolan’s that has been consistent to some degree through all of his films is that of the mentally tortured protagonist. In most of his films, excluding the Batman series, the protagonist is not only beset by inner turmoil but is teetering on the brink of insanity. The Young Man, the unnamed protagonist of Following, is a clear case of the unreliable narrator. As the story progresses, the truth becomes less and less certain. One last detail that I found interesting: the thief who leads the Young Man into a life of crime is named Cobb. In Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, also a thief of sorts, is named Cobb. Interesting.

Following is rated R for language and some violence. It is available for Instant viewing on NetFlix.

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