Cashback (2007)

Cashback arrived in 2006, expanded from a short film that had charmed festival juries two years earlier. It concerns Ben, an art student whose breakup leaves him sleepless, and who takes a night shift at a supermarket to fill the hours. There he imagines he can stop time, which he uses to undress female shoppers and draw them. The film presents this as a meditation on beauty, memory, and the pause of a film frame. More precisely, it is the fantasy life of a young man with a sketchbook and no supervision.

The cultural ledger here is remarkably clean, in the sense that nothing has been entered in it at all. The cast is white, the gaze is male, and the sensibility belongs to a 2006 lads' magazine with better lighting. There is no racial consciousness, no queer presence, no environmental anxiety, no grievance about money. The supermarket is a stage set, not an indictment of retail labor. The bodies on display are young, slender, and idealized, and the film regards them with reverence, which sits at some distance from any modern conversation about bodily acceptance. An insomniac protagonist is not a study in neurodivergence, and the narration's musings about time are aesthetic, not moral.

Critics split along predictable lines. Some found it charming and gently erotic. Others, including the review in Slant, called it misogynist, and that verdict has aged better. The film remains a curiosity, a work assembled before the current era's moral bookkeeping became standard practice, and therefore unable to satisfy it on any count. Every marker returns empty. The time-freezing trick shots retain a technical appeal, and Roger Ebert was probably right that the whole thing is lightweight. The rest is a handsome reverie about a boy who likes looking at women and is rewarded with a gallery show and a girlfriend. The classification is complete, and brief.