Author: BRWC

Writer/director Martin Saulnier’s (co-written with Jean Boileau) THE LINE is, for my money, the perfect way to do science fiction—long form or short, but this being short form the impact is all the more concentrated and profound.  The immersion is full, the terms straddling the razor line between concrete and ephemeral—the edges of allegory are skirted but a boundary stays uncrossed, the hint at something larger is kept bottled, a universe pinned and wriggling to the wall.  Think something of a cross between the final two episodes of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (indeed, it is easy to think such with the central character being dubbed Number Six) and a stage-play version of a Terry Gilliam aesthetic (the gloom of Brazil without the freneticness, visual touches of the “future sequences” of Twelve Monkeys) and you’re in the neighborhood of understanding the evocative cinema of The Line:  a dystopia denuded of hero or villain, the threat of life and death removed to be replaced with something…well…that is rather the point, though. With Something. Unending.  Something to take comfort from or to rebel against, both reactions meaning the same: the Borg versus the Borg (conceptually, of course, as there is no “versus” to be found in this film, which is part of the delight.)

The terms of the narrative are simple. Number Six, one of countless drone-workers standing at assembly line doing…something…flashes of self-consciousness crossing his face as he is constantly instructed (from colored lights and seemingly pre-recorded voice only) that he is to replace some other Unit (Number 344, Number 248 etc.) that has been deactivated.  Slight evidences of “violence” at the abandoned station (white puddles on the ground) and images of Number Six, himself, writhing on the ground flit across screen ever-so-briefly as we, the audience, are moved through this nondescript workplace/worldscape (yet, please understand me that while it may be “nondescript” it is more endlessly expressionistic and inspiring of self-induced landscape that detail could provide; I could almost smell the world for all its apparent nothingness).  Number Six’s consciousness emerges in the form of mild agitations—why is he the only Unit who can replace the deactivated ones (and why does it matter?); what is meant by “deactivated?”; and does his utility as Replacement inoculate him against this consequence or is it merely arbitrary, words on repeat loop, the same for him as any other?

Well—then of course, after every other rotation has been done, we see just what deactivation is (the same vice calmly intoning that this time Number Six has been deactivated and Number 51 is the only Unit capable of replacing him)…and yet…we do not see. Not to say there is any ambiguity—we see it, we go through it, the process, the Technician character introduced and conversant with the Worker Drone—but like all brilliant sci-fi we are simply opened up to the next layer of thing, a deeper clockwork (if clockwork it be) left to ponder.

Indeed, I found just as much of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine society on display in this brief film: a world so refined as to genuinely be perfect, nothing to do for or against, even the glitches and the rectifications of them an integral part of the “all that is.” The struggle on display in this film is neither cautionary nor cynical—it is a depiction of a specified, even rarified, evolution, nothing arrived at (or so it struck me) by power struggles or predatory one-upsmanship or enslavement (these Units do not seem enslaved—which is a very important part of the feel and the narrative—and the Technician’s do not seem slave-keeper or even controllers) but merely a glimpse of something way far along on some Darwinian arc—the beautiful blankness (no sense of cleanliness or uncleanliness to either the pure white sets or the pitch black sets) of the production design allowing no indication of catastrophe or decay to “blame” for the conditions.  This is evolution, both conceptual and physical, peaceful and yet audaciously blood curdling (one can almost hear Hamlet intoning “…a consummation devoutly to be wished…”)

And like all of the greatest sci-fi, the interpretations of the crumbs given to we as audience are endless—fortune tellers bones, tarot cards sun-bleached and not quite readable for all our squinting.  For example?  The Technicians are women and it is the women who remove the men from the line, announce to them their return to consciousness-less and perform the simple functional adjustment to return them to “almost blank slates” working the line again.  Now, in the terms of this world, this is clear gender evolution: the closest to “giving birth, creating life” (female) and “giving raw material, fertilization to the process” (male) that can be found.  Even in the brief flash of the Technician (female) slightly besmirched by a speckle of blood (the evidence of physical pain and trespass into the “reactivated” Units flesh) and the words “I so enjoy…” we see perhaps the remaining evidences of sexuality, of intercourse, of coupling, station-to-station—some scrap of reminder at the necessary interaction that keeps the humanity to this all, keeps it from quite being reduced to mechanism, purely (makes it almost important, romantic, not to be acted out against, the work room and technician room now the equivalent of a garden and a private boudoir). Again—no villainy, no superior and subordinated—just a bizarre cross-section, the way a lung could be shown working in tandem with a kidney.

And I would be absolutely remiss as a film critic (indeed as a film lover) if I did not take a moment to simply gush at the actor playing the lead: Christian Laflamme.  Never have performed before on camera, this man is able to bring limitless story and depth, excruciating humanity (without any melodramatics or traditional sense of “struggle”) to Number Six. It is absolute beauty to behold the paragraphs and volumes, the poems that the creases of Laflamme’s  face reveal, the history inside of history inside of history that (through his performance and features) we understand is stamped forever on these “people” even as they retain nothing but the ghost of a skeleton’s memory of their own specific selves. It is not despair at understanding something has been taken, it is not sadness or even a sense of “the void surrounding one”—no, there really is no name for what it is on Leflamme’s face—which is perhaps the finest and most evocative Special Effect this cinema gives (and lucky to the filmmaker for knowing this fellow): his face is a perfect depiction of a state of emotion, an evolution of human reduction and resilience that honestly does not yet exist: there are maps of everything the film does not show in each whisker of the fellow’s visage. A radiant, understated, unique, and wholly essential film performance—a testament to the necessity of humanity in science-fiction, in and of itself.

Another gem I discovered in competition at the Viewster Online Film fest 3, The Line is transcendent and haunting, a nightmare and a daydream, the unique quiver of terror that truly comes from seeing some prophetic rendering removed from context and time: equally as titillating and horrible whether long ancient or yet to come in futures so forever away as to be rendered imaginary.   I cannot with emphasis enough recommend looking in to the film, here:  THE LINE

It is impossible to watch writer/director Marsibil Saemundardottir’s short film FREYJA without thinking of the early films of Roman Polanski—the syrup thick atmosphere (syrup and glass shards, to be more directly evocative) the unnerving, claustrophobic tension, and the sense of alien-ness to every object of familiarity, banal reality turned grotesque and hobgoblin without changing shape or being tarted up in gimmick.  In the ten minute run time, there is such immense respect to each atom of the cinema that the minimal becomes excruciatingly maximal, each spec a haunt, each moment somehow the sum total of ten of the film entire, and then some.  I found myself tempted to say it is “deceptively simple” but decide this is not true—one, because it would suggest there is some game-play at work in the film where there is none, and two because it would discount the majesty of the fact that it is, in fact, flatly, aggressively simple and if anything the piece showcases how “simple” is not slight. The film is glorious in its simplicity and trust of the language of cinema, is a case-study in not only “less is more” but “less is Everything.”

One of the deftest maneuvers of the film is in the subtle double-use of each and every of its only several camera set-ups.  Each serves, at once, as a perfectly voyeuristic, forced-angle, play-with-light-and-dark rendering that puts the viewer in the increasingly unnerved mindset of the central character (that is, makes it feel that we are her, being watched) while at the same time thrusts (mostly unconsciously, but all the more devastatingly for this to a viewer who finds themselves made complicit in such a sneaky way) the viewer in to the position of being the interloping presence this character feels encroaching, strangling in on her: We, the Audience, not only know due to the fact that we are watching a work of cinema that there is “something else there with her” but, wanting to or not, FEEL the knowledge, the certainty of this because we, by our presence, are it, embody it, and so feel a sickening sense of approaching delight in our eventual decent and capture/obliteration of the character. Indeed, we would be not only disappointed, narratively, if the film did not reach its inevitable conclusion, but Personally, as our hand, ready and willing to play the part of the somehow omniscient victimizer, would have been stayed, our mouths unbloodied, our guts not turned gulity.

In the short run time and stark use of select images, the film crackles with the power of the minimalist and in so achieves one of the purest goals of cinema: its sparse, exacting telling (without expositional detail to lean against) allows it to create true moments which can immediately be recognized as Iconic.  Indeed, each shot skirts the edge of this—a full personality and entire art piece to each little shave of sequence—so that when the image that Is the film arrives it has earned itself a history, an instant recognition as “that moment that is now a fully enveloped memory to the viewer.”  That image? The central character, Freyja, having closed herself in the cabinet, the telephone off the hook, cord dangling off from the counter in the foreground; Freyja filmed from carpet level struggling to open slowly enough the door to not produce the grating, high pitch squeaks that cannot be stopped or reduced, that announce her (and the child in her belly’s) vulnerability to the at once wide and narrow confines of the house we as audience/monster have become familiar is Icon, is eternal, is the still frame as though plucked from a nightmare, the felt/experienced memory of personal horror and trespass most certain to return to a a viewer’s idly thoughts again and again in life.  The build of the film to this, its small, genuinely disquieting moments leading up to this flagrant image of “doom and desperation” (not to mention symbolic value—Freyja, with child, confined to a space wherein she can sparsely fit, womb-like, and unable to escape for herself without sounding the call of her own undoing and that of her true vulnerability within her, her mortality and immortality both to be obliterated at once) is so graceful it cannot but be met with an admiring regard on the part of the very entity that will ultimately pounce—and so the shot lingers, we as audience in equal parts in awe of beautiful vulnerability and tongue licking at our own hungry teeth to move to the undoing we await.

Indeed, even the coda of the film (switching from black-and-white to color) is immaculately doubled in its import.  Flashing the viewer ahead a number of years to make explicit what the final moment of the interloper’s decent toward Freyja meant, while also leaving it mysterious (that is: ambiguity has been removed, but not finality) at once allows the viewer a sense of closure, narratively, but to (even with a pang, perhaps, of sick-at-our pleasure in the enjoyment) be victorious is our shared role as intruder, annihilator.  We know we succeeded and remain unknown, that the experience we had belongs to us and becomes our secret to keep.

A spectacularly, chilling bit of cinema, Freyja was my personal favorite offering from the films I was able to take in at the Viewster Online film Fest 3.  A true masterpiece, in all respects, I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Information on the film can be found here: FREYJA.

So, how does one go about making a short crime film that pops, seems original, non-derivative—actually seems like a piece of cinema to be genuinely experienced, not just a jaunt through tropes and empty stylization?  Don’t get me wrong—even the trope-iest crime short (or feature) can be fine and dandy while, by that same token, films that strain to “subvert convention” (often by such overt-stylization they almost efface themselves by their ends) can be dreadful. So how does one, in a short, remove themselves from mere exercise, mere “this is my version of what everyone does”—at best homage, at worst sub-par regurgitation?

Well—writer/director Salvatore Castellana seems to have a keen grasp of how with FISH HEADS, a short I had the pleasure of encountering while in competition at the Viewster Online Film Fest 3. Indeed, the film is a mini-Master Class in not just how to do pulp crime well and uniquely, but how to do indie-cinema without being beholden to the status-quo (or worse, the lowest-common-denominator, as so much indie film skirts, even with the best of intentions to do otherwise).

To begin: the script is genuine—harkening to the true spirt of French-New Wave more than the bastardized, repackaged contemporary hodge-podge that shares the root (or pays lip-service to it, at any rate).  The script has an artfulness that at once takes itself quite seriously (it, you know, wants to be a good piece of cinema, first and foremost, an “audience pleaser” second) and yet with a freeform giddiness that does not (as with its seriousness) become “in service” to the notion of soliciting the general popularity. That is: it is a film that respects the audience by being precisely what it is, not what it figures will be liked: its rhythms, its humor, its shocks, its structure, better or worse. The writing has a palpable energy from this earnestness that pulls the audience right along, giddy in the same measure (or, pulled me along in that fashion, anyway).

It doesn’t hurt either that the film’s visual style is far from being either a subdued “Tarantino riff” or a frenetic “Ritchie imitation” (the modern “go-tos” for edgy/indie crime, even as these sources become quite dated) but has more in common with Man Bites Dog or the original short film of Bottle Rocket, has a Goddard-ian slick that is a rough-hewn as it is precise.

Add in a leading man (the entire cast is pitch perfect, let me say, and beautifully “non-actor” seeming, making the gravity and presence of each role hit in a genuine, non “character-type on display” sort of way, this in turn allowing the glissando of the film to work all the smoother, the leads performance aided and magnified due to the ensemble) who is equal parts Tom Jane (circa Last Time I Committed Suicide) James van der Beek (from Rules of Attraction, is what I mean there, so I am clear) with a dose of Ed Norton’s Everyman and Justin Timberlake’s charisma and the film can do little wrong. Indeed, Alex Cendron’s performance, moving without missing a beat from assured mile-a-minute dialogue delivered with staccato musicality to subdued, wordless menace (mingled with quiet charm) is so good the film could be shit otherwise and still be fantastic.

Then there is the overall styling of the cinema: the crime is secondary to the “feeling of crime” the specifics are an aside to the “sensation of pulp”.  Yes, we get enough to understand all we need to understand and avoid that awful, forced “gravitas” so many noir/crime pieces (both ones of humor and ones of earnestness) just cannot get away from. Now ,let me stress, the script does not drift so far off it becomes cotton candy pulp, a la Soderberg’s Ocean’s films (in fact, it is kind of “if Soderberg had done an Ocean’s piece but mixed in more of the grittiness of The Underneath, as long as I’m playing comparisons) it’s not funny where it is funny because it plays for cute—its funny because crime is funny, ugly is funny, the gallows are funny. The script makes each beat work, the execution of the by way of the mingling of excellent cinematography, performance, and musical score leaves one (or me, anyway) feeling indicted just enough to have deeply enjoyed the grimy kick of the ride along without any sort of moralizing or (as is so in vogue these days) ennui laden nihilistic bullshit.

Crime is fun—everyone knows it—and the fun is in the unexpected, the upending of a world. The tinier the rock one turns over to find bugs under, the more fascinating—Fish Heads picking up just the prettiest but most commonplace stone and finding a real squirmy little bugger under there to both recoil from and squint down at, big grin on ones face.  Highly, highly recommended–and the film can be found in full at its site, here: FISH HEADS.