Faasla is trying a few interesting things, like dividing the screen in different ways so that its directors can show different moments of their lives in isolation. There are often windows in the first act. Sometimes, the corners of the screen show towels or slippers on the floor without caring to pick them up. Other corners show hygienic rituals because they, unlike the rest of the public, have not lost their dignity despite isolation. Nonetheless, the cameras are mostly a safe distance from those windows and from everything else, a metaphor of the spaces they desire to cross but can’t.

There’s a potential for story or meaning in the images in Faasla, some of them full of desire. The rest, though, feel like artsy trolling. The film’s (anti-)climatic scene has what looks like a close up of a snail crossing the screen. Metaphors don’t always have to be this obvious. I’m trying to read something into this and link to it earlier images of both directors taking footage of their plants. They started to do all this then the pandemic began. Those Instagram reject videos of their backyards, with this snail, feel like a bad millennial version of Walden.

The film oscillates between natural retreat and facing urban fears, images of modernity with bilingual subtitles of love poems that make white interpreters of Rumi feel respectful. These directors started this project as a way of showing how they communicate and receive information during the pandemic’s first year. That rough year made viewers dread what it’s like to be single. There’s a silver lining to this film in that it shows. There is something worse than dying alone during the pandemic. And that is to express that love of nature and others through film in an embarrassing and unimaginative way.