Brew Views: An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

Love, deconstructed.

By Rebecca Jacobson

Like a lovesick diary entry, Terence Nance's feature debut, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, loops from confession to self-doubt to blind infatuation. The film is a blend of documentary and narrative, detailing Nance's occasionally blissful and often fraught relationship with his ideal(ized) woman. The woman isn't named here, but she's Nance's real-life friend and sometimes lover Namik Minter, and in the film she both plays herself and becomes a character in Nance's retelling. "It's like my life put on screen to your music," Minter says. But Nance prevents the film from devolving into a puddle of self-indulgence by lacing his voice-over with blues recordings and cutting in vivid animated sequences, playful doodles and dreamlike multimedia collages. Nance and Minter's relationship might be tentative, but the film's construction is wondrously go-for-broke.

  1. Showing at: Hollywood Theatre. 7:30 and 9:30 pm Saturday, 2:30 and 4:30 pm Sunday, June 8-9.
  2. Best paired with: Occidental Cloudy Summer Kolsch.
  3. Also showing: Silver Linings Playbook (Laurelhurst Theater).

WWeek 2015

Rebecca Jacobson

Rebecca Jacobson

Rebecca Jacobson is a writer from Portland (OK, she was born in Seattle but has been in Oregon since the day after she turned 10) who's also lived in Berlin, Malawi and Rhode Island. While on staff at Willamette Week, she covered theater, film, bikes, drug dealers-turned-barbers and little-known scraps of local history.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office.

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