A group of friends go on a weekend beach trip to a family home but are disrupted by a clamming expedition where one of them becomes frustrated at his inability to open a clam in Lisa Romagnoli’s short dramedy How To Open A Clam.
Before viewing this 13-minute short film I did a little digging (pun intended) and discovered that The Yarmouth Clam Festival takes place every summer, on the third Friday in July, in a charming coastal village in Maine, Massachusetts. Each year around 80,000 people visit the Festival in Yarmouth and it remains a perennial bonding experience for the local community. It became an annual tradition that provided a sense of seasonal timekeeping and a centrepiece for homecoming gatherings and reconnections with basic hometown pleasures. Through working and having fun side-by-side, passing on traditions, and making memories, the festival helps to build a strong community.
Writer/director Lisa Romagnoli manages to take this quaint local tradition and create a loving and respectful dramedy around it with How To Open A Clam. It doesn’t take place during the festival itself but is filmed in the same place. Beginning with some lovely establishing shots of three friends raking for Clams in a lake in Massachusetts, the story focuses on the friendship between these old friends, how growing up means growing apart, and plays on our own sense of nostalgia and grief. Adam Alexander Hamilton plays Adam whose grandparents have recently died and, while visiting their soon-to-be-sold home with his friends, decides to collect clams like he used to do with his family years before. Along for the ride are his friends Patrick and Alex and both are quite different characters. An interesting decision is letting the actors use their own names for the roles which are unusual but do allow for a sense of naturalism that director Romagnoli does well to coax from her actors. Patrick is played by Pat Reilly and his performance is reminiscent of the John Belushi or John Candy anarchic roles in the 80s, while Alex has a bit more depth to his personality and cares deeply for the well-being of his friends.
While Adam attempts to open his first clam (known as clam-shucking), Alex and Pat spend the time debating what they should be doing while they are there. Pat wants to go and party down at the beach while Alex would rather stay and spend time with everyone in the house for one last hurrah. The rest of the film is spent following these friends as they decide how they should devote what could possibly be their last summer together.
From the offset, the film is beautiful to look at and the quality of the camera work is sumptuous; praise to cinematographer Eric Brouse whose imagery takes in the beautiful Maine scenery giving the short film a look of a nature program. The way he frames the internal shots also helps to create a sense of vastness with our three characters engulfed by the large house and the woodland that surrounds them. The colours of blue, grey, and green permeate the production, and it gives the short a certain cinematic quality. If there is one minor criticism, it is that the film feels particularly slow-moving; there is not much excitement, and other than Pat riding a bike no memorable set-pieces.
What we do get though is a film of realisation. As Adam gets more and more frustrated at being unable to shuck his clam, we realise that this is merely a metaphor for his current state of mind and, as he succeeds in his task, the realisation of what he has lost and what he could lose hits us all.
How To Open A Clam is a slow-burning but thoughtful drama that allows you to sit back and go with the flow; it’s certainly no river rapids, it’s more of a relaxing lazy river. Jump in with both feet and simply bask in its lovingly directed warm glow.
Leave a Reply