SXSW 2011: Critic's Notebook
by Steve Dollar 
Everyone talks about the cheap beer, the country barbecue, the crazy parties and, sweet Jesus, the blessed transmedia synergy. But there's one sure thing you will discover at
South by Southwest, early and often, especially if your advertised "downtown" motel turns out to be hell-and-gone up the Interstate. It is this: Austin's cab drivers are even wackier than the notoriously storied hacks in Las Vegas. One afternoon, sozzled after a dozen cans of ice-cold Pearl Beer, waiting for a lift back downtown from
Fantastic Fest impresario
Tim League's big-ass crawfish boil, I was greeted by a sight unusual even for Our Nation's Weirdness Capital. Thumping down the street was a bright yellow mini-bus-like contraption dubbed The Land Yacht. Turns out the beast was a karaoke cab! Lady Gaga gaga?d from a pair of video monitors that the driver worked from a dashboard computer screen. As we rolled into town from the hillside League Compound, the hirsute and histrionic Brad Delp of Boston?may he rest in peace?materialized as guitars squealed in power anthem ecstasy, reminding me that it's "more than a feeling."
True. The very best moments marking the film component of this year's SXSW had everything to do with emotion, the real, raw, rag-and-bone shop of the heart stuff, transfigured through the prism of cinematic art (or mayhem). And I'm not just talking about the pyrotechnic heartbreak of
Bellflower.
Sophia Takal, the first-time director of
Green, gets to the same dark place, deploying the flamethrower glare of actor Kate Lyn Sheil to ignite her rustic psychodrama. It concerns hip Brooklyn couple Sebastian (Lawrence Levine) and Genevieve (Sheil), whose relationship goes through a loop when they retreat to a country house where he intends to write about an adventure in sustainable living. Their solitude is soon gate-crashed by Robin (Takal), a compulsively chatty neighbor whose twangy intrusiveness gradually charms Genevieve and then Sebastian, even though her lack of urban sophistication and casual regard to boundaries make her, at first, a source of condescending amusement. Pretty quickly, though, you surmise that this isn?t some micro budget riff on
Green Acres.
Suspense pervades the seemingly tranquil scenery. Takal came up with the story as a way to confront her own jealousy issues, casting her fianc�e Levine (who played her brother in his own
Gabi on the Roof in July) and their Greenpoint roommate Sheil. The same plot points could occur in the usual indie mise-en-scene?a dumpy living room, the bedroom, the shower, the coffee shop?but Takal comes up with all kinds of ways to complicate matters. Long, single-shot scenes lensed from a voyeuristic remove; use of a blissful wooded setting whose natural splendor grows increasingly oppressive; a seemingly out-of-place ambient score whose electronic dread implies we're watching a horror movie. In the mind of Sheil's Genevieve, we are.
The two women could almost be sisters, or cousins, and for a spell Takal has us wondering if the movie might be headed toward the doppelganger madness of
Persona or
Performance, or given Sebastian's frustration with his writing project, some flip on
Antichrist or
The Shining. The movie isn't about any of that at all. (Indeed, the director says she's only now catching up with all the movies that people tell her
Green reminds them of). Yet, by evoking our common experience with these kinds of movies, sustaining tension and anticipation, Takal pulls us into Genevieve's emotional undertow with an equal degree of watchful unease. While sharply edged writing and resourceful camera-work fosters the sometimes painful intimacy that marks other notable relationship meltdown dramas (
Everyone Else, et al), Sheil's nervous system vibrates like a tuning fork, revealing astonishingly subtle evolutions of feeling. (She also does amazing things in a werewolf mask, playing a riveting muse in Joe Swanberg's likewise raw
Silver Bullets, a fragmented meditation on filmmaking and fidelity that finds the prolific director venting and reinventing himself).
Working with a similar inventiveness amid a paucity of means, director Zal Batmanglij and his co-writer/star Brit Marling create a kind of literary sci-fi thriller in
Sound of My Voice. Marling, who came out of seemingly nowhere to become the "It Girl" at Sundance this year, plays Maggie, an enigmatic young woman who leads a cult from her basement lair deep in the San Fernando Valley. Cleverly shot and edited to slowly reveal key details, the plot follows Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), a very Silver-Lakey Silver Lake couple who have turned sleuth, sneaking into the cult in order to expose it. Although they may only really be doing this because they want to spice up their relationship, they fully invest themselves in the necessary rituals: changing into pure-white garb, indulging embarrassing group encounter exercises, and learning a top-secret handshake that seems silly at first only to later serve a killer twist. Gradually, Maggie's charismatic pull begins to break through Peter's skepticism, and the arc veers darker and stranger. The terrific script also toys with tonal elements. Expectations are kept off-balance by introducing humorous scenes, by turns subtle and absurd, that take the piss out of New Age pretension and yuppie entitlement (not for nothing were the filmmakers inspired by a scary yoga instructor). One of these riffs involves the most creative use of a Cranberries song in the history of cinema. This might all add up to a soggy
X-Files knock-off if every single key component wasn't perfectly executed. But it's all there, from the minimalist set-ups that leave almost everything to the imagination, to the casting (the luminous Marling is not a hype), to the screenplay, which accomplishes with dialogue what a $20 million budget never could.
Weekend, British director Andrew Haigh's two-hander about a romance between two gay men that runs the course described by the title, won the audience award in the Emerging Visions sidebar. The leads (Tom Cullen and Chris New) are appealing as they navigate the push-pull dynamic of a bar pick-up that might be turning into something more, but the film itself never evolves past the talking stage. It looks like thoughtfully written and acted British TV, rather ploddingly straightforward and predictable. No one can say that for Alison Bagnall's
The Dish & the Spoon, which tracks a similarly brief love story. Dejected, and a bit deranged, a young woman (
Greta Gerwig) reels from the discovery of her husband's infidelity, but her would-be campaign of vengeance is derailed when she stumbles onto a waiflike boy (
Enter the Void's Olly Alexander, unruly mushroom cloud of curls suggestive of the young Bob Dylan) passed out on the Delaware beach. He's just come all the way from England to meet a girl, and been coldly ditched himself, which makes him a handy companion in freewheeling misadventure. Gerwig, soon to share the screen with Helen Mirren and Russell Brand in the
Arthur reboot, now proves far more than mumblecore's Garbo. It's a delight to watch her carry the film's in-the-moment evanescence, which feels practically early '70s in its restless spirit.
When a man loves a woman, he?ll do just about anything to ensure domestic tranquility. Thus does the kitchen-sink gender combat of
Kill List shift from the boozy, bruised-knuckled realism the English do so well into something scarifyingly creepy and bizarre. Ben Wheatley's genre-twister, which was quickly acquired by IFC Midnight, raises the ante after the subdued mordant wit of last year's
Down Terrace. Neil Maskell and Michael Smiley are ex-military specialists turned contract killers who sign up for one last job, paid for by a mysterious and eccentric client. The story initially foregrounds the everyday boredom of the characters' lives as if they're just another pair of working stiffs, more disturbed by the stress of hosting a dinner party than carrying out murder for hire. The film's irreversible shifts in tone take a downward spiral into primal horror, foreshadowed from the opening title sequence, that won't easily be shaken. The soundtrack alone, a sinister electronic drone that Wheatley describes as "60% pig" squeals, will make you cry for mommy.
Posted by ahillis at March 21, 2011 5:20 PM
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