Author: BRWC

“Hey white boy, what you doing uptown?

Hey white boy, you chasing our women around?”

On Boris Wexler’s Roundabout American

By Pablo D’Stair

Being something equal parts cinema-lover and fatuous film-theorist, the experience of viewing Boris Wexler’s Roundabout American was a very particularized pleasure for me.  As perhaps some people have come to know through my writing, I have a bit of a soft spot for both dry, low-key comedy and for the “outsider looking in” expression of specialized aspects of America and its culture.  Wexler’s film delivers on both counts but does, in my view, something quite a step more interesting on top.

Our lead Alex (Edouard Giard) is a French divorcee who comes to America to be with a young woman he chatted with a few times on the internet, only to discover rather than the full-on-zesty-abandon sort of very French passion he had been expecting, he is unceremoniously told he ought not to have bothered, as the young woman needs to stay with her current lover due to the fellow having “drinking and anger issues” which necessitate her loyalty and help.  So our French-transplant finds a crumby flophouse motel, spends a night drinking at an equally dismal hole of a nowhere bar, expounding his desire to understand and be truly American—to be unrefined, without class, to be joyfully-joyless by freeing himself of the burden of the incessantly ennui-laden romantic ideas inherent in the European.  And when he wakes the next morning after having gotten blotto drunk, he discovers he has made a friend who seems capable of providing him with the opportunity to do just that—Ron (Patrick Zielinski) obese, guileless, open-armed and easy-hearted, offers a walking tour of the city of Chicago.

***

Now, here is where my intrigue with the film began—already immersed in the atmosphere of the foreigner as fish-out-of-water, I half expected the theme to continue, this to be a “Well isn’t America funny when looked at from X Y or Z perspective” deal, but rather than go this (often delightful but certainly well-and-often-trod) route, the view of America’s Culture Wexler explores is far more ethereal, closer to an exploration of America’s Culturelessness. Closer, though not quite the thing—it seemed Alex was being traveled through an America as expressed only by a series of progressing tropes pulled from US film-comedies, each segueing quite seamlessly into the other to give a narrative of neither external nor internal logic, a logic that drifts through itself, a kind of commentary on the celluloid dream-life of the typical American-nobody, a person more aware of their world through its expression via lowest common denominator cinematic silliness than even a vague sense of the reality this silliness purports to skewer.

But let me be less ethereal in description, myself. As the film progresses, we see Alex guided through such time honored tropes as “Foreigner-getting-to-know-indigenous-American,” this via Alex befriending Ron—they walk the streets and have non-sequitur, witty back-and-forths, the exaggerated buffoonery Alex expected and (only perhaps sarcastically) spoke of the night before while drunken (something which seems should be personified spot-on by Ron) revealing itself to be less a grotesque and more a kind of “loser-zen.” Then, we have the “Meet the American-cum-foreign family” sequence, the script (which, by the way, boarders on being Bottle Rocket repeatable and nuanced in delivery…or if not quite Bottle Rocket perhaps what Gentleman Broncos should have been but just didn’t quite hit) done in a style of classically stage-mannered comedy—overly awkward introductions, precisely honed stereotypes that don’t quite fit stereotypes, the oddball secondary character who enters the room just to energetically deliver a humorous punch amidst deadpan-worlds-collide confusion only to bolt out, only to bolt back in twice as awkwardly at the next Flight of the Conchords-esque scriptural lull.

During all of this, we also get our first hint of “oddball fringe plot” that will extend our odd-couple’s adventure—in this case Ron taking far too seriously Alex’s offhand idea about a pizza delivery service that also delivers prostitutes. Yes, just so very American a comedy trope, the “No, this is not a very good or necessarily comedically sound idea…but it is a reason enough for hijinks” through which Wexler seems to delight in pointing out the distance between refinement-in-absurd-comedy and American-boneheadedness-in-comedy, coyly twisting the two around a controlled finger into an actual cohesive unit of genuine commentary.  The foreigner finds the idea absurd as something to actualize, decides to spend his last day in the country spending money indulgently and, as long as the idea of prostitutes has come up, by getting himself one of those (and, of course, one of the classy kind).

And here we have our next trope—for it just must be so in American comedies that Love is just a bought-and-paid-for fuck away, especially when the prostitute (Helena, a marvelous performance by Marielle de Rocca-Serra) is a golden hearted foreigner pretending to be an American, herself, and so capable of falling into the kind of unthought-through love Americans tend to over-romanticize foreigners into the high priests of. And love it is–instantaneous and full. Love it is.

Cue the “Let’s go ahead and run with that pizza/prostitute business solution to all woes of all our characters” trope—though Wexler is wise enough to take this forced-no-matter-how-you-slice-it decision and treat it as an enthusiastic romp, as the delivery system for commenting on the obviously blundersome heart of any such comedy. That is, unlike, say, Kevin Smith with his wholly dreadful Zack and Miri Make A Porno, wherein Smith tries to eke out some genuine pathos, to sublimate a boorish idea meant for eventual frat-house slapstick into something it simply is not, Wexler just tick-tock-tick-tock moves through the permutations of “running with a zany idea being harder than it seems” (some very nice scenes of interviewing potential whores) and seems to consciously do so only insofar as  it serves to get Alex back together with his hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold (who, in case you hadn’t guessed, is quite business savvy, to boot).

Ah, but I am remiss in not mentioning that delicately throughout this all some of the most important Wild Card tropes of Comedy-Movie-American-Style have been sprinkled in: we have the “friend with connections” who, overzealous and undereducated, has the entrepreneurial zap to get things going, if not smoothly then just enough to bring in the “running afoul of organized crime” element for some sense of that danger a comedy-trope-tour of America would not be complete without—and just for good measure, this criminal element allows for the high stakes “dirty politician” (in many senses of the term) angle to come into play.

And well…mix em up, mix em up the film plays on—but all for the purpose of our central wanderer Alex being able to explore himself in the funhouse mirror of how “the romantic male” is portrayed within the framework of the American laugh-along zeitgeist.  Some ups, some downs, some of those hijinks I mentioned earlier and another slate of rom-buddy-caper-comedy tropes eventually leaving Alex spat out just right back where he started, deus ex machina, all’s well that ends…well…maybe not quite.

***

Let me reset a moment to explain that my aforementioned delight of this film was a measured thing on first viewing and that just around this seemingly “happy-in-a-way” ending being delivered I thought it had taken a wrong turn, lost the plot and actually just flatly become what I for a moment thought I’d been too generously considering it merely utilizing as a platform for delivering some original slant.  Because, of course, to row through the choppy waters of some ten or a dozen American comedy tropes can lead to a kind of seasickness, a little bit on the viewer’s part of “Well…I might be interested in this despite this” by the point of a sudden injection of “all of that was just for chuckles.”

Thankfully though, the film ends up even more where it started than it seemed it was going to—in fact it arrives Alex back to his baseline Europeaness, his malaise-ridden, hopeless-romantic self. For in the fallout of the rumble-tumble of zaniness, Helena is deported back to Russia, receiving not so much as a “Je t’aime” from Alex when he briefly speaks to her through partitioning glass at Immigration.

Alex, dutiful to his pulsating romantic overreach, months later takes a trip to Russia, arriving as he did in America, only to be met by Helena, properly put in his place by having it quite soberly explained that life does not work like a European romance, either, and then left outside a rather intimidating Russian nowhere hotel—no prospects, no love, just a heart full of never-going-to-be-filled.

Roundabout American is an understated, distinct, an uniquely affected journey through-and-out-of an America I can only imagine is exactly how the one I live in must seem to those who dwell outside of it—baffling, inane, meaningless, best appreciated in either just arriving to or being ejected from.

***

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing late in 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

“I’m squinting my eyes and turning

Off and on and on and off the lights”

A Perspective on Gregory Frye’s Experimental Documentary ‘Muses are the Life Blood’

By Pablo D’Stair

If more than a half-dozen or so people knew me, it would be well known that I have something of a marked disdain for documentary filmmaker Errol Morris and his technique of all but effacing the gravity of his subjects with filmic tweaks and faux-avant overlays, his penchant for doing almost anything to avoid letting the simplicity of having the people he has access to speak and deliver commentary on themselves and the germs of whatever larger subject is being plumbed.  I find it fundamentally egregious to treat the living subjects a documentary film is filtered through as mere parts of a larger mechanism of stylistic cinema—put flatly, documentary should never be style-over-substance, not even somewhat.

Muses are the Life Blood

I begin here by mentioning this because filmmaker Gregory Frye treads a line close to what I’d called Morris-esque in his experimental documentary ‘Muses are the Life Blood’.  But in the flatly proclaimed word ‘experimental’ Frye avoids the sins of Morris and his ilk, in fact does more than just side-step them, manages to actually give reason for utilizing the subject as a stepping off point for his own exploratory, even indulgent, stylings. Here, indeed, indulgence seems to be the order of the day, for the experiment of the documentary style Frye takes is not (or does not seem to me) to be centrally stating interest in his surface subject—the painter Zoltan Galos and the particular artworks being prepared for an installation showing—but instead posits as primary subject his own take on the paintings, his documenting being of his own reaction, mindset, interpretation while the painter and paintings, themselves, are utilized only so far as they can help him explore this.

Admittedly, my gut does tighten and begin to crawl a little at this choice, but just as admittedly I know that to approach the cinema as audience though this bellyache would be quite a pointless, even infantile, mistake.  To me, I will say it, having access to such striking (I am unabashedly in love with the paintings displayed, find them spellbinding) artwork and to the creator of it begs—even demands—a more traditional (or perhaps better said ‘humble’) exploration.  By all means pan the camera over the work endlessly, let the individual images bleed themselves into multiple, into infinite, become almost animated as they do—this is a most singular attribute of these paintings and one that Frye should be commended for so lavishly letting have the best part of the stage—but for Christ’s just let’s please hear the painter speak on them—not to explain, not to lecture, but to give audience the human voice of Creator in concert with Creation (maybe some effervescent music of sorts subtly loitering behind things).

Frye though, chooses to create distance from the painter, but does so in a way peculiar enough to beget honest intrigue. The film opens with a brief and candid introduction to Galos, the man giving a few offhand remarks about the hard work of preparing the installation, the dreadfully oppressive air of Athens, and the jolly enjoyment of having a beer because of those two things.  And then he is gone (except for a few disembodied remarks made part of the music which takes over—with force—the audio portion of the film).

As I say, this troubles me in a principle way and would trouble me more than that if not for a subtle moment where, in the midst of an effect-laden bit of filming, Frye shows the painter hammering some nails to set one of the canvas right, this after five minutes of audience being exposed to nothing but the naturally morphing, even narrative strokes of the man’s products. The painter is set as tinkerer, workman to the life that is now removed from him, nothing more to do but set the canvases up, apply the titles, have his beer.  In fact, Galos’ removal gives a certain beauty to his free-floating voice talking of “Muses” and their apartness from the artist, Frye’s film (or so I say) giving physical manifestation to the ethereal thing that art is, presenting Galos (in humility) as Audience (if even that) to the glory of the manifestation of the Muse which gave him what he himself, having expressed, in no way posses any longer.

Because this, to me, is Frye’s take on the whole interface of Art and Artist (a somewhat reductionist take on the originator and a more than euphoric yawp concerning the result of the origination) I feel less combative in turning my mind so directly to the filmmaker, do not feel there is trickery going on, do not find him to be looking to aggrandize his view undeservedly off of the majesty of a subject matter he’s nothing to do with—really, this moment of Galos made artist-as-tinkerer reinforces the kind of charming gall of the affection in Frye’s film as a whole.

I mentioned before that I would, for myself, perhaps prefer some more melodious musical style to accompany the paintings.  Indeed, being forthright, I cannot but state that the music seemed so at odds with my own reaction to the paintings I might have gone so far as to think it intrusive to the point of obscene.  The music and its sense of discord (Frye being the composer and performer, it needs to be noted, though crediting himself pseudonymously as misterwoe) conflicted with the organic flux each single painting had—the music, to put it another way, was so insistent (or seemed to me) of a jaggedness, an oddness, a sense of writhing, unearthing, even just a kind of “weirdness” that it appeared to me to be choking part of the paintings’ breath out, not letting them stand alone (‘Could someone shut that shit off,’ I may have more than once thought wryly to myself while the film progressed).

But of course this is the collision of Audience with Artwork and (more importantly, something in the days since watching the film I have given the experimenter more and more credit for) the collision of Audience with Audience, which is, I postulate, the clash Frye aimed for, the goal of the experiment. Frye set his own particularized response, expressed in as raw a manner as he could honestly manage, as a Control to, in effect, let each audience be Variable to it. And the same thing could not be accomplished by letting the ‘art speak for itself,’ because the art—as Frye has Galos clearly state, redoubling the statement with his own technique—comes from elsewhere, is infinite, continually variable, has no specific mindset or argument, is a static perfection, a conduit asking nothing, only expressing.

To give a volatility and to explore his own reaction, Frye needs to play provocateur (not flamboyantly, but through equal artistic honesty to the material he uses as prompt)  needs to make the audience, for better or worse, fight for their reaction in opposition to his own.

***

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.

“Where do you come from? Where do you go?

Sorry that’s nothin’ you would need to know.”

A Response to Eva Stotz’s Global Home

by Pablo D’Stair

It didn’t take long to feel that Eva Stotz’s documentary Global Home and I were a regular Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn seated across from each other over a long dinner, the film doing its best to relate some philosophy of life I was meant to see a nuanced new perspective in, me taking in each word and image but feeling increasingly peculiar, like there was some basic principle my dinner partner was overlooking, that they were trying to make an observation-writ-large when the simple honesty of personal statement was more apropos.

Like the two diners in Louis Malle’s exploratory film, this documentary and I never got to a place of equal footing and, like Wallace with Andre, I never got shut of the creeping feeling I was being halfway lectured to, halfway sold a bill-of-goods.

***

Global Home begins with the filmmaker in a personal (if somewhat aloof) manner speaking of the electronic connectivity of the modern world, juxtaposing it with her early years of rather isolated, rural living, this observation stone-skipping to the idea of her being possessed of a kind of philosophical rootlessness, a kinship to the nomad-heart but a kinship she has some uneasiness with. Why this lack of desire for roots? Why this ingrained wanderlust in the blood?  The film sets itself up as an exploration of what makes this woman want to roam, suggesting she will look for the reason by way of plumbing the minds and experiences of kindred spirits.

But past this introduction, this person who has presented herself and her condition seems to evaporate, the film becoming rather non-corporeal in its presentation. The film shows footage of the world, of particular places the filmmaker travels—lingering footage of everyday life, street scenes, traffic, rooftops, footage with no commentary given—but less-and-less shows or gives voice to the filmmaker’s perspective on any of it.

What Global Home does do is introduce a particularized method of travel through the aperture of a non-profit organization called Couch Surfing. In a nutshell, this is a social network in which hospitable individuals from various part of the world meet via the internet and offer to let each other stay at each others’ dwelling, free-of-charge.

***

Couch Surfing seems a very nice thing, indeed—but (and the film never seems to address this) a very particularized opportunity built on undercurrents of a very specific worldview, one based from a station of privilege, no matter how one slants it.  It is a method of travel (nomadic-ness, the film suggests) necessitating a substantial monetary base for its figment “freeness”—someone from the US, for example, must first and foremost be able to afford the thousands of dollars for an airplane ticket to Mali, Japan (etc etc) and only after this may be set up with a hospitable individual who will allow them residence, no money asked, for the length of the stay.

This is something the film seems to dwell on—this lack of “monetary exchange.” A philosophy is presented that Couch Surfing is a method of travel seeking to be antidote to some (to paraphrase certain folks who are spoken to in the film) highly corporatized method of travel and exposure to the world, a corporation-controlled (or at least conditioned) culture of human interface, one the film suggests has the goal of homogenization, of “same-ing” cultures and peoples rather than celebrating differences in lifestyle, custom, etc.

This tacit philosophy is hard driven in the documentary, discussed variously and at length with no specific examples given of “corporate-soulless-travel-methods” in any form—Couch Surfing seems (instead of merely being explored, merely said to exist as a thing that some may participate in) to be placed in a singular light, as a bold and departing philosophy from the stagnating norm of “how the rest of the world does things.”

Well and good, perhaps—the film suggests a grandeur, a new dramatic angling to the age old notion of “traveling on the cheap,” a certain version of residence-swapping, of hostel-living, of communal/group travel in order to see how the rest of the world is without “commercialized, tourist culture” sullying things. But in this, it perhaps oversteps a bit, aggrandizes peculiarly, explores a “method of travel” ad-nauseum while ignoring an exploration of the intricacies of “travel” itself.

And how this returns to the notion of a “wanderer’s heart”…is something I admit I looked at somewhat askance. Without counter-example, showing other methods of travel (of nomad-ness), the repeated notions of what Couch Surfing achieves took on the air of part advertisement, part hyper-specific (even cloistered) view of the wider world.  The film spends time with the founder of the non-profit, discusses (fleetingly) the ins-and-outs of how it works, always lacing in a kind of mission-statement and this mission-statement is given always with a sense of “This is how Couch Surfing is different than…” to the point I could not help but turn the most obvious question “Different than what?” into a cudgel at the sameness I was presented in, it seemed to me, nothing more than rather run-of-the-mill travelogue footage.

***

I am often negatively struck in travel documentaries by how “other places” are presented to the audience. I cringed at moments of Ewan McGregor traveling via motorcycle through Kazakhstan and sundry other places sometimes stopping at indigenous dwellings and holding up bowls or utensils to remark on their workmanship, treating living homes like museums of curiosities.  And this over-exoticizing of what is just the day-to-day life of people was present in the very broth of Global Home, adding to the sense of “privileged outsider view” of travel and of the world.

Even in the “I want to follow you on a normal day” approach of the filmmaker, a subtextual oddity exists—because ordinary days are what we are presented and any sense of finding them especially “different” because they are happening in other parts of the world is a forced hand. It was as though the film suggested it should be a surprise that people do things everywhere and these things are interesting when, to me, the reaction is simply “Of course people do things, of course they are intriguing for their ordinariness—ordinary life is, yes, beautiful.”

But this is not something world travel has the market cornered on revealing. Nor, I might add, is encountering basic human hospitality and desire to interact and share.

An addendum to these above remarks is that the reinforcing of the “privileged outsider view” is made uncomfortably evident in that the subjective “freeness” (monetarily) of the filmmaker’s travels to have these differences-and-samenesses of human life revealed takes on an almost glib posturing—there is the problem, not so much addressed, that if travel is needed to have an understanding of one’s place in culture, one’s identity, then what of the people who do not stray far from home regularly, if ever? The film does (I do not believe purposefully, but nonetheless) suggest that they face an unconscious stagnation, an unawareness of the tapestry they are part of, their lives, by the filmmaker, made examples of a larger whole but in this somewhat denuded of the wholeness they themselves contain.

Flatly, I will say the film did not strike me as a discussion of or a delving into a nomad-headspace versus the headspace of one seeking or possessing strong roots—quite the opposite, there was a stark timidity in its version of Explorer.  In it setting up as so a priori the idea that “kindred spirits need to be sought out before travel begins” it removed, in my view, the principle magic and intrigue of travel—the “unknown” the participation of being pure outsider and finding a way in, an interface with raw humanity.

Further, I could not help but feel the wider world was being boogeyman-ed by the film’s slant. This organization (Couch Surfing) the film seemed to say, helps people feel less alone, because without it to travel into the “individually unknown world” almost certainly will cause isolation, outcastedness, as though if one doesn’t have someone waiting to show them around the World will ignore them or have them come to some foul.

As I say, this I found to be for the most part tacitly and subtextually expressed, but at times I felt the noia simmer to the top of the pot, for example in a rather non-sequitur mention that a Mali music festival was no longer taking place out in the wild desert but closer in to populated areas because of a spate of human-trafficking abductions—this presented with no exploration, no context, just a little pepper of “there’s danger out there” seemingly set in support of organized get-togethers and travel networks.  Again, this set so without counter examples of travel method—from staying in hostels or staying in hotels and just having a walk around to encounter the wide array of strangers one might—seemed to paint as over-unique and even “necessary” Couch Surfing as a solution to goblin-problems never quite named.

***

As Global Home wound down, I found my position as Wallace to its Gregory all the more on point. In Malle’s film, Wallace says (after having listened to Gregory talk of his travels and expound his philosophy of such exploits being necessary to exploring the fullness of the human condition) that he could go into the cigar shop down the street and likely discover such nuance, humanity, and reality as would blow his mind—to this, with somewhat dimmer eyes, Andre reasserting that, no, he thinks the departure, the radically unknown is essential, a kick, a prompt needed to wake people up into a truer, fuller revealed sense-of-self.

This is especially poignant for me in response to Stotz’s documentary, because something I thought at odds with itself was that the simple lives the film depicted could be (and are) just as readily, continuously happening down the street, a bus route away, a day out by train, everywhere, all the time.  And this sameness, honestly, in the very footage the film presented (what happened in Mali so like San Francisco so like Japan etc.) seemed to be something to celebrate—yet the voice of the film so consistently rallied against such notions as watering down, homogenizing, diluting the world instead of finding infinity in commonality, the world only and wonderfully as different as any one person is to any other, independent of how, when, why, or to what purpose or with what intention any two happen to touch.

***

Pablo D’Stair is a novelist, essayist, and interviewer.  Co-founder of the art house press KUBOA, he is also a regular contributor to the Montage: Cultural Paradigm (Sri Lanka). His book Four Self-Interviews About Cinema: the short films of director Norman Reedus will be re-releasing October, 2012 through Serenity House Publishing, International.