306 Hollywood movie review & film summary (2018)
The Bogarín’s makeshift archival project eventually morphs into the meticulously photographed non-traditional documentary “306 Hollywood,” where their grandmother once lived in a humble old home. As a kind of hybrid documentary with magical-realist elements, the film brings family photos to life, sometimes recreating memories, or using experimental sequences to illustrate Ontell’s recorded musings from a decade’s worth of interviews.
When digging into their grandmother’s former life as a fashion designer, the documentary closes in on the many fashion magazines Ontell once faithfully collected. In another scene, gorgeous models wearing the clothes their grandmother made walk out in front of the old house like in a fashion shoot. They then take the dresses off, revealing the old vintage lingerie of yesteryear, and begin dancing while holding up the dresses to their sides like a hanger. This is not the last time the movie will veer into surrealism.
There are moments in the pair’s Michel Gondry-esque archeological dig when their grandmother’s everyday things become art, playfully or precisely arranged to evoke a response. For a photoshoot early in the film, old photos, tchotchkes and antiques are composed like life-sized scrapbooks on the floor as the camera captures the objects’ worn textures and faded colors. In one of the film’s closing shots, her shoes and dresses are arranged in front of and on top of her house. The items looked like they were laid out on top of a bed, waiting for her to get dressed and ready to leave home. It’s a kind of summarizing scene that shows off what the siblings were trying to accomplish: to create art from their memories.
However, the film does take on a number of tangents to further explore the concept of re-examining one’s life through the objects they held onto. Elan and Jonathan interview a curator working on the Rockefeller family’s estate about his job, a physicist about holding on to every particle of a person, an Italian librarian about cataloguing a life’s work and a funeral director about what she thinks of souls. Of course, the conversations are all rooted in the same story, but at times, the meandering nature of these conversations feel more like a distraction. They take the emotional focus away from grandchildren coping with the loss of their grandmother and replace it with a philosophical distance.
