How Do You Measure a Year? (2023) Documentary Review: Time and again, people have tried to understand growing up. What makes us grow up? Of course, scientifically we always have a crystal-clear answer with keywords such as physical growth, hormones, brain cells, bones, etc. But the emotional answer is, at times, difficult to navigate. But the process towards finding these answers is always worth it, because it invites something that is the key to human existence – introspection. Cinema, in particular, opens that internal door towards the world around us, whether we see it or make it.
In many ways, ‘How Do You Measure a Year?’ does that, both to its protagonist and its enabler. The thing that is going on here is so simple yet so charismatic that it often reminded me of Charlotte Wells’s profoundly moving ‘Aftersun’, in that it acknowledges the tenderness of the life and lived-in father-daughter story at its heart. The documentary finds Jay Rosenblatt taking the Boyhood-esque route in real life, fixating his camera towards the face of his daughter Ella Rosenblatt for the first eighteen years of her life. And he does that on only one day – Ella’s birthday.
Using a simple home movie format, his camera gazes on the simple-minded Ella as she sits or lies or jumps on the couch. The questions are often unclear, but they interrogate the meaning of power, or ask her what she would say to her twenty-five-year-old self when she watches the video, and inquire about her various dreams and nightmares. To make sure the questions are not all duds, he also asks her about the highlights of the previous year. The answers are often simple and expected, but they can also be razor-sharp, feel wise beyond their years, and hilariously funny.
Most of all, they are unrehearsed, repetitive and raw. The footage does not feel made for the camera’s sake, and the answers by Ella can often take you by surprise. One moment that stands out in particular is when a very little Ella tells her father that it is he who scares her. That answer changes to “dragons and monsters” an year later. Similarly, when asked for the first time what power is, she mistakes the word for “powder” that is used for vaginas. The answer to this question evolves really well over the years. In the process, a very real coming-of-age story gets unearthed, and gets surprisingly affecting.
Which is not to say that the film is not amateur at the end of the day. The questions have more thought behind them than is necessary, and aid a more manufactured feeling towards what is otherwise entirely organic. The fleeting feeling of watching something that has been well-planned before the existence of the protagonist sustains throughout the 29 minutes of its running time. The operative repetition of the material does stick out like a sore thumb, and so does the self-consciousness of it all. The parts where the Jay himself makes an appearance are bland in comparison to the saccharine sweetness of the rest of it.
However, it cannot be denied that the feeling of watching someone evolve over time, their thinking and their choices becoming more pronounced, their feelings taking a definitive shape as a result, and finally growing up learning things is quite profound. All of it unfolds at a rather natural pace and gets stitched together seamlessly. Rosenblatt’s outward treatment of his daughter as a subject never gets in the way of the grounded emotional affection we feel for her as someone who needs to be protected no matter what. At the end of the day, we realize that we are watching a human being as cheerful as we might have been in our childhood under normal circumstances, and that slice-of-life normality taking precedence over commerical cuteness is what makes ‘How Do You Measure a Year?’ such a grounded and effective effort.
It is flawed and amateurish in places, and the questions themselves warrant little philosophical merit. But overall, it is deeply felt and maturely dealt with, and its position on a popular streaming service gives it the status of a lifelong gift to return to again and again. And if that is not what cinema is to human memory, what is, really?
