While the rest of the planet was watching Iron Man 3 in Super Imax 3D Sensurround, we took in two remarkable films this weekend:
Dans La Maison (In the House) brings two unlikely characters together. First, there’s Claude, a high school student who covets his best friend’s middle-class life … and his best friend’s middle-class mother. As his calculated moves slowly make him “one of the family,” he writes a series of essays about his progress.
Those papers horrify — and then mesmerize — Germain, the boy’s creative writing teacher, who (despite strong misgivings) aids and abets Claude’s efforts in order to keep the compelling chapters coming. There’s lots of hand-wringing over the ethics (or lack of them) involved, and lots of justification (“I’m only concerned with developing the boy’s remarkable talent!”) for doing nothing, even as the boy’s plan threatens to rip his friend’s family apart.
As readers (and movie-goers), we’re the ultimate voyeurs, watching intimate moments and even crawling around inside the heads and hearts of the characters in the stories we consume. Dans La Maison reminds us we’re all Claude (who wants to live a life other than his own) and Germain (who can’t stop turning the pages, no matter what the consequences are).
There’s a different kind of crawling around in heads going on in Upstream Color, the second movie by the writer/director of one of my favorite indie movies, Primer.
On the surface, the plot looks like this:
- A mysterious thief drugs victims at a bar, rendering them so complacent, they do whatever he asks (including handing over their life savings).
- A woman, Kris, wakes after a lapse in memory to find her savings gone and her life in shambles.
- A man, Jeff, strikes up a relationship with a damaged woman, eventually confessing how he ruined his life with a drug addiction. (Or did he?)
- A pig farmer uses low-frequency sound to manipulate and control the parasites he harvests and implants in pigs.
- An dealer in exotic flowers discovers a new breed of orchid producing a blue powder, and neighborhood kids quickly discover its pollen has applications as a hypnotic drug.
All these storylines co-exist, floating on the surface of the movie like splotches of oil on turbulent water. They bump into each other, fuse together, and drift apart, and there’s no effort on the part of the filmmaker to connect the dots for you. (In fact, there’s a deliberate effort to shuffle events, obscure connections, and deny cause and effect.)
The result is intriguing: a story that can be taken many ways, with connections that only become apparent upon reflection. In the theatre, this jarring little film washes over you; only later, upon reflection, do the pieces fall into place — a process that mirrors the experience of characters themselves.
Neither film features jaw-dropping computer-rendered effects, explosions, or big name stars … but both have stuck with me, haunting me, for days after I watched them. You can see ’em both (one at Midtown Arts, the other at the Plaza on Ponce) for the price of a single ticket to the Imax 3D version of Iron Man 3.
People who’d go see Iron Man aren’t likely to go to either other film. I saw IM3 and saw Upstream Color at SXSW. I liked the directs other movie Primer better. The lack of narrative was exhausting. Upstream Color is also on iTunes so one doesn’t even have to leave the house.
Well, to be fair, I’m being a bit tongue in cheek, especially with my post title. I do love a good action film (though I’m not particularly enthused by Iron Man 3), and I also love good experimental and foreign cinema. My Netflix recommendations are all screwed up, because my tastes are so broad, the recommendation engine doesn’t know what to make of me!
There were times the lack of a conventional narrative did make Upstream Color seem a bit indulgent, but the fact that I’m still pondering the movie days later is part of its charm. Glad I saw it at the theatre instead of iTunes, though; there’s something about seeing a movie in a big, dark cavern (and especially upstairs at the Plaza on Ponce) that just can’t be matched at home, no matter how tightly I close the drapes and no matter how much popcorn I pop!