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Weird is the name of the game at the Fantasia International Film Festival; you can always count on your average festival pick to feature some level of weirdness, or horniness, or avant-garde experimentation. (It’s telling when the most normal entries at a film festival are the blood-soaked action thrillers; more on those as these dispatches progress.) But some of the strangest acid trips of the festival have come courtesy of these next three titles, pure-strain hallucinogenic experiences that care not for the conventions of traditional plotting or naturalism, and instead just want to get their freak on.
So let’s start with a beautifully grimy, Lynch-meets-Linklater Aussie curio by the name of “A Grand Mockery,” courtesy of Brisbane-based filmmakers Sam Dixon and Adam C. Briggs. The story, such as it is, concerns Josie (Dixon), an aimless loser living out his repetitive days in the hipster confines of Brisbane: he wakes up, pours himself a coffee mug of boxed red wine, and shuffles through his go-nowhere job at an indie movie theater. The first act locks us in this routine, Dixon and Briggs’ choice to shoot on Super 8mm film giving it the grainy, liminal feel of a reality that feels like it’s slowly coming apart at the seams. And indeed, as the film progresses, it does; Josie seems to struggle with purpose, with mental illness, with the deteriorating confines of life with his dementia-riddled grandfather and the corpses in the cemetery he talks to in his free moments. (Yes, he’s the kind of guy who spends his time hanging out in cemeteries, his furrowed Cro-Magnon brow and long, stringy black hair making him look like a malnourished Glenn Danzig.)
As the film progresses, these moments repeat, with even greater and greater surreality, as Josie’s own sense of calm snaps out of order. Mysterious growths begin to form on his neck, the beer and cigarettes begin to flow ever more as Josie enters increasingly vulnerable states, his body collapsing ever more into a dead-eyed husk. It feels like Brisbane, and his life within it, is killing him slowly, and we’re just left to watch it slowly happen to him.
In this sense, “A Grand Mockery” is highly successful, a fucked-up fever dream that soaks you in the mindset of someone’s honest to God existential breakdown. Granted, that single note sustains throughout the entire piece, which can feel a bit repetitive once you know where it’s all going. Still, the goal is less to bring Josie to a conclusive story than it is to sit in the rot and filth of Brisbane’s hipster scene. It’s the kind of film you sense more than analyze. There’s something here about the alienation of modernity, of an elemental desire to return to nature to escape all of civilization’s horrors. No number of three-paper joints, of vinyl records, of intimate moments with loved ones can save you from the void. For all its occasional moments of dark comedy, it’s a film that makes you feel ill.
In a slightly more irreverent context, we have Oklahoma’s favorite indie film son, Mickey Reece, and his latest, “Every Heavy Thing,” a curious ode to the journalism and tech thrillers of the ’90s, with a hefty dose of infectious fun to its goofy premise. I’ve enjoyed Reece’s idiosyncracies in the past: See “Agnes,” an exorcism thriller that zags in the middle to follow a nun who just nopes out of the movie she was in, or “Country Gold,” which interrogates the clashing generations of country music through a vaguely Lynchian lens. “Every Heavy Thing” is a bit more laidback and more overtly comedic than those, but still doesn’t lose its surreal touches.
Here, Reece turns his oddball sensibilities to the rhythms of De Palma and David Lynch, with seedy underbellies of polite working-class society giving way to dreamlike nightmares and no small amount of surreal humor. Our window into this world is Joe (Josh Fadem, making great use of his twisted, confused expressions), the nebbishly ad salesman for a tiny alt-weekly in “Hightown City,” who ends up playing an inadvertent part in the serial killer schemes of a sci-fi tech billionaire (Josh Urbaniak, whose resemblance to Fadem doesn’t feel accidental) after he witnesses him off a lounge singer (horror maven Barbara Crampton) on a night out with his buddy. (Shades of “Blue Velvet” there already.) Urbaniak’s maniac wants him to take part in an “experiment”: He cannot tell anyone what he has seen here, and he will be dead within the hour if he does. Trouble is, his paper is beginning to investigate the mysterious disappearances of several girls around town, and the intrepid new beat reporter Cheyenne (newcomer Kaylene Snarsky) ropes him into the hunt. He knows who did it; can he keep his mouth shut as the bodies pile up?
“Every Heavy Thing” is lightweight for a Reece picture, but there are still fun signposts of the American id on display: Joe’s father (Reece stalwart Ben Hall) gleefully showing off his appearance on a gun-rights YouTube video, the Neuralink-y sci-fi schemes that undergird the whole affair, and so on. And in the middle is Fadem’s Joe, a classic De Palma protagonist coming apart at the seams with nervous energy, especially as Urbaniak’s William Shaffer invades his dreams (rendered with delightfully low-fi VR effects that sell the comic surreality of his predicament). Here, the realm of the Internet, and digital communication, become a means of confusion and control, as virtually every character is weighed down by some exploration or hidden want or expectation—all except Joe, an ordinary man so settled in his own life he must deal with the consequences of others’ own journeys (Urbaniak’s tech utopia, his wife’s budding affair, an old friend [“People’s Joker” director Vera Drew] reappearing post-transition to infer that she thought he was going through a similar journey).
It’s all very surprising and retrofuturistic, and unexpectedly funny. (One scene featuring a jailhouse guard who humors Joe’s cries of innocence is a real gut-buster.) Mickey Reece continues to make films that, while products of their influences, defy description.
But perhaps it’s fitting to move from De Palma pastiche to something approaching the ribald anarchy of John Waters, coming home to Chicago with Alex Phillips’ indescribable “Anything That Moves.” Phillips’ followup to “All Jacked Up and Full of Worms,” itself a horny, transgressive picture, “Anything That Moves” begins with a cherry-popping sequence of lovemaking in the woods between Liam (Hal Baum) and young Julia (Jade Perry), encouraged by her sister, and Liam’s girlfriend, Thea (Jiana Nicole). The movement feels right; her eyes light up, and as she goes over the edge, a floodlight beams over her face, and orchestral piccolos trill and crescendo in tandem with her. It’s the gift of orgasm Liam brings, himself a sex worker who spends his days biking around the Chicagoland area in a red wrestling onesie, dropping off sex and sandwiches to his roster of clients (via a hookup app that feels somewhere between Sniffies and DoorDash).
He seems happy with his role, Phillips gleefully swapping the gender roles of this kind of picture to demonstrate the ease and care male sex workers can carry for his clients, both male and female. “Anything That Moves” spends a great deal of time glancing at the equitable commodification of his sexuality, and his casual attempts to reclaim and hold it close. Take an early scene that feels ripped out of any number of ’70s pornos; classic porn star Ginger Lynn Allen getting railed in her home by the delivery boy, Liam. But rather than linger on the sex, we just get the tail end, and Phillips takes greater care to check in on their post-sex sandwich eating and casual banter.
It’s not all grinders and grinding, though; there’s a serial killer on the loose in the Windy City, and Liam finds himself implicated in the murders by a couple of mismatched cops (Jack Dunphy and Frank V. Ross) who finger him for the death of Julia’s dad (Paul Gordon). The story is only vaguely interested in that, however, serving instead as background for Liam’s various encounters with both Julia and the varying johns and janes he runs into throughout his work. There are gloriously reveled-in golden showers to go along with rivulets of gore as the killer does his work, all shot with vibrant color and urban grit by cinematographer Hunter Zimby. And, of course, one brightly-lit cinematic orgasm after another, as Liam does his thing with clients on all ends of the gender and kink spectrums.
The opening credits are emblazoned over close-ups of dollar bills with thick penises drawn elegantly over them, a lovely metaphor for the film’s exploration of the intersections between sex and commerce. But it’s also no dour treatment of sex work; “Anything That Goes” is chaotic, raunchy, and weirdly sweet for its bursts of violence. Sure, there’s a serial killer on the loose, but there’s also a purity of heart in Liam’s embrace of sexual freedom, and the solidarity of those who join him on their kink-friendly journeys. And that’s something to be celebrated.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/l9woVS5
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