The disparity between what feels real on film and what feels real in real life is so huge as to be negligible. Film is nothing at all like real life in the ways you expect. You don't point and shoot. You plot, rehearse, wait, and wait some more. To be worried about a shot and to trouble over a scene takes the filmmaker immediately out of real life, unless your real life means you're making a movie. If your aspiration as a director is to get at something real in a movie, you hardly need to dispense with story, and in fact Audley doesn't. Team Picture might be blissfully devoid of melodramatic incident, the kind of empty noise celebrated by the film-going public at large, but it tells a story and works within the established rules of narrative, cinematic and otherwise. Its true masterstroke is coming at story in a different way, making its audience conscious of narrative and the neediness we have for it. What happens when you withhold it? How far can you remove its elements before it ceases to be? The brilliance of Team Picture and Audley's approach (and, be sure, there is one) is that it asks you to be conscious of narrative and motivation in ways reality infrequently calls upon you to do.

Team Picture is a gorgeous movie, sad and dreamy in places, with a quality of acting and characterization and an ear for sound and nuance that few movies achieve. I got so excited watching this movie where nothing is said to be happening that I could barely contain my imagination and sit still. I'd watched a music video beforehand. I don't dance, which is to say I don't think of myself as someone who does, or don't wish other people to perceive me that way, but the dancing in the video had a similar effect to watching Team Picture. It made me think about myself differently. It made me want to express a different side of myself, to slow things down or speed them up, to play with time and limits of silence and sound, to burrow in or out of who I think of myself as, to get closer to something about myself or other people. That's what really good film and insightful performance does to me. It's an escape of some kind that elicits some well of real feeling. The most patently melodramatic film can put you in touch with reality; scenes of pure fantasy can make you feel more intensely than you normally do, to make you aware of feeling, what it means to feel. People have been seeing themselves in actors for years, and understanding themselves better. The performer in you watches a good actor and learns.