Tea for Three

Details

Samuel Vines | United Kingdom, Switzerland | 2015 | 9 m

The film Tea for Three is a playful look at power relations, the illusion of confidence and control and a look at the role of women in the past century. Its experimental, improvised and has strong emphasis on rhythm and physical movement. The film is set in a town house we see a highly strung house wife micro managing her jumpy Japanese maid, her husband totally ignores her. Out of the corner of her eye the wife imagines that her husband and the maid are dancing strangely but when she looks at them they continue their usual business. If that wasn’t strange enough the wife hears a eerie scream which neither her husband nor the maid hear! Unnerved, the house wife gets back to checking on the maid in order to keep her mind off the strange occurrences! The guest arrives and the power-dynamic shifts, because the guest gets a lot of attention form the husband. The beautiful meal, which the wife had prepared, with such an eye to detail, is consumed in a completely disgusting way. Worse still the husband and the wife seem to be flirting and rubbing each others feet under the table! The starts wife to lose her grip and paranoia enters her reality. The climax is kind of heady psychedelic nightmare. And during the final shot we hear screams from other houses on the street suggesting that the roles dictated by society don’t necessarily work for the people who have to fulfil these roles.