Beauty in the eye of the beholder?

Terence Nance's An Oversimplification of her Beauty is like the best graduate-student workshop-project film ever made - which is to say that it shows an abundance of technical talent, of imagination, of daring - and yet, by the end, and I have to admit I was fading by about half-way through this relatively short (90 minutes) film, the whole is less than this sum of its parts. It's a compendium of just about every narrative device in the repertoire, and some in fact that have never before been in the repertoire: scripted acting, improv, archival footage, hidden camera, animation, stop-action, frames within frames, voice-over, handwriting on screen, and many more - always visually engaging, up to a point. Overall, the simple "story" if it can be called that involves a guy who's rebuffed by a girl w/ whom he's been flirting and on whom he has a serious crush, and he uses this rebuff as an occasion to examine their relationship and several other failed relationships in his life. In a stronger film, this would present us with a complete and surprising portrait of the artist, and we would continue to learn more about him (or her, or both), perhaps in surprising ways, throughout the film - and, even better, he would continue to learn more about himself. For comparison with a slightly similar, excellent film - see Stories We Tell, by Sarah Polley. In Oversimplification, unfortunately, it seemed to me as if we were going over the same ground repeatedly (we kind of were, in a literal sense - as many scenes repeated - another narrative technique seen in some experimental films, even narrative ones, such as Run, Lola, Run). All told, lot's of talent here, which, when someday linked with a strong narrative, might lead to a truly knockout film.