The Tip: Interlaced Losses of Dignity, Remuneration, and Life in Story of Two Young Men in Hate

Peter Vazquez’s 12-minute The Tip feels fresh. Though marketed as a comedy, it is at least a dramedy because the only people laughing are the villains in this Sisyphean narrative about a pizza delivery guy being daily humiliated by a deranged man-child and his coolly sociopathic girlfriend. 

Over the course of several minutes, you see the boiling pot reach ever closer towards the point of irreparable change as Tristan (Grant Sower) finds new and more capricious ways to toy with Arno (Vasquez). But Arno cannot stop it, and Tristan cannot see it. When foolishness is a tragedy, characters like Tristan cannot help but be tragic. 

The trigger—more precisely, the excuse—is Arno’s flickering interest in Bianca (Yasemin Cem), Tristan’s beautiful and equally malicious girlfriend. Arno’s interest is notably portrayed. Desire is undercut by the frustrations of a minimum wage job with shitty policies—Arno is a man falling fast in love with the mirage while the heat of his material conditions burn him every night. Thus when Tristan picks up on Arno’s crush, Arno responds not with overt guilt but irritation over the payment he is owed. 

The trick about Tristan’s character—and Bianca’s as well, for that matter—is that he is farcical in his vileness and it is also what makes him feel real. The bullied know their bullies exclusively in their capacity to do harm for sport. Whatever Tristan is or feels outside of the seconds or minutes he spends rubbing Arno’s nose in the latter’s social and financial poverty, the tight framing within the cramped apartment building seems to say, is an irrelevant matter in this schema. In another universe where the degrees are lesser in either direction, complexities of character would perhaps have more weight. 

The score is generally relentlessly upbeat in keeping with Tristan’s character, only slowing down or going completely silent when Arno has room to breathe in his absence. In the end, when the silence becomes too much, a piano score settles down on it. Whether it is to rescue Arno or merely to draw a sheet over the hush is uncertain, but there is no mistaking that liberation it is not. Tristan is Arno’s tragedy.