Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019)

 

Director: Miguel Llansó

Screenplay: Miguel Llansó

Cast: Daniel Tadesse as Agent D.T. Gagano; Agustín Mateo as Palmer Eldritch / Batfro; Guillermo Llansó as Stalin / Roy Mascarone / Agent D.T. Gagano (Cartoon Version) / Stalin's Assistant; Solomon Tashe as Batfro; Gerda-Annette Allikas as Malin; Rene Köster as Captain Lagucci; Lauri Lagle as Alfons Rebane; Carlo Pironti as Mr. Sophistication

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Stop sodomising me agent, and try to find a way to wake up.

I think it says a lot about Llansó's film that even its country of origin is bisected into many. A Spanish filmmaker partially filming in Ethiopia, which was the backdrop for his theatrical debut Crumbs (2015), but also Estonia and Latvia. The one thing we can confirm is that the resulting product, helped into birth by Kickstarter funding, is eccentric.

Effectively imagining if the Cold War existed in a pop culture morass, this has the C.I.A. against the Soviet Union in cyberspace over the Psychobook, an imagined world in tech accessed in chunky old virtual reality helmets. As expected, the virtual world is not so safe, as is to be found with the unfortunate end for a C.I.A. agent whose eyes get burst. Instead, Palmer (Agustín Mateo) and Gagano (Daniel Tadesse), the later the star of Crumbs and the lead, have to take over. The later, planning to retire with his girlfriend Malin (Gerda-Annette Allikas) to fund her kickboxing academy, and maybe take his obsession with pizza margherita to creating his own restaurant, has however to do one last mission. Tragically, this leads to his consciousness being lost in the Psychobook whilst a computer virus in the personification of Joseph Stalin, by way of a paper cut out which is stop motioned to speak on an actor's face, is trying to acquire power through hacking his enemies.  

It feels apt that, in this genre mash-up, that two of the co-producing territories are Estonia and Lativia, formerly two Soviet controlled territories behind the Iron Curtain, time having turned real history into Cold War pulp stories which Llansó has deliberately bastardised here. The other espionage films, though, may have not had Ethiopian kung fu masters named after pasta dishes, post-dubbed voices, and Batfro (Solomon Tashe), a man in an Adam West era Batman costume (with the insignia blurred on his chest), who is probably a villain but definitely hates drugs, in spite of the fact a Soviet propaganda film playing on a "Better-Ethiopian" television shows him snorting blow at his swanky mansion. A film like this, in the modern form of cult film, can be a double edged sword in that they skirt the line between reward and the danger in their style and weirdness, where after their fifteen minutes of fame they can disappear after being hailed as new cult films. This film to its credit has the advantage that, just two films in his career, Llansó has a style entirely of his own. Something which depends on whether he can, even if he decides just to make pulpy weird genre films, sustain a compelling world of his own from the virtues he has here.

A huge thing in his favour is that, having to work with a low budget he had to sustain with a Kickstarter fund, Llansó's solutions are completely unique. The world of the Psychobook for example, whilst in reality and having real actors, brings in a curious form of stop motion where some actors move with herky movements, encapsulated by the bizarre and even profane decision to have their faces paper cut-outs, rendered to speak, of famous figures. Palmer and Gagano for example, though the later becomes himself trapped in the virtual world, compete their spy work with the faces of Robert Redford and Richard Pryor as talking masks, the former in hindsight Llansó showing some savvy, or even unintentionally, by evoking Three Days of the Condor (1975), a "proper" conspiracy thriller fed from an era of disillusionment and paranoia whose lead's face is replicated here. It feels befitting, rather than trivialising the true sadness of the Stalinist regime, that Joseph Stalin, a despot behind many purges, is now reduced to the visage jerkily moving, and visibly wearing Nike shoes as one zoom in shows. Once a figure whose visage was likely seen on many framed pictures in Soviet Russia, that he is now surrounded by Mr. Sophistication (Carlo Pironti), a man so cartoonishly accented in his Italian accent to compensate for being an elderly man, and Batfro, is an apt punishment in terms of being embarrassed in death.

A lot of the film does feel of a post-ironic era of weirdness for the sake of weirdness, which I have become more averse too simply because too many of these films come about, get praise, and then suddenly disappear because they are not with much after the initial reaction, even if you are fond of them in the initial afterglow of the theatrical experience. Truthfully, the intentionally absurd edge means Jesus Shows... is not abstract to me at all, because it shows its hand in being ridiculous immediately and never really comes off as dumbfounding in what weird thing it does. What it does however, and I am hopeful for Llansó in regards to, is that this is made by someone willing to be brave in their work, including the fact there are moments from its three directors of photography where they clearly shot on film, 16mm to be precise, which is a surprise to think was done for production value and adds a texture to the world onscreen.

Llansó also clearly knows the references he is winking at, as he even has the Adam West Batman, uncensored, in the film even if it is a bizarre television advertisement playing in the background with Batgirl talking about finance. Pre-existing footage of submarines jars with chiptune music, and old archaic tech matches with video game logic, where an unseen voiceover says "Round 1" when the pasta named kung-fu masters fight an Ethiopian Shaolin monk protecting the "Ark of the Covenant".  An old portable television, now housing a man trapped without a body, evokes melancholia and sadness in the same think where, returning to the kung fu fighters, suddenly one has to think of Wakaliwood in Uganda, and that one day we will be getting even more martial arts films from the various African countries with all the people who can perform actual high kicks in the continent as we also see here.

There is a danger, if a hundred years passes and cinema lives still, where one has to ask who will get any of these references but in a way Llansó is treading into references some people even now do not get, like Redford being a face, or that inexplicably fly men with laser eyes appear to evoke old b-movies, one of which may have been Jesus Christ trapped in a controlling monster costume full of variety box chocolates of enlightenment. Inexplicably in the middle of writing this review, I am thinking of Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a film full of references most will have not heard of in just forty to fifty years, both films subsuming the viewer into the past and forcing them to rethink symbols, and even if Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway has to be released with a glossary of references in a hundred years, like a Penguin Classic film release, it at least is a film of its own quirks as much as references. It is distorting the references, and even if you do not get any of them, the film sustains a logic and compelling nature that, if it wins you over, then digging into the references will grow and nurture your admiration for it. Even if I strongly suspect it is closer to the pastiche films of now then a legitimate alien oddity I am drawn to, to the film's credit Jesus Shows... has so much I admire that I did love it, so much to see Miguel Llansó one day pulling out a real alien on me when I least expect it.

Certainly, he does so much right. The thing which won me over was that, whilst there is chiptune in the score, also good in a soundtrack made by three different people, he has for the score mostly jazz. An exceptional jazz band soundtrack, between cool jazz to avant-garde, which is not a score you usually have in a wannabe-neo-cult film, would have needed time to composer, and is beautifully idiosyncratic. His casting is also something unique and admiring. Daniel Tadesse, who is a compelling screen figure, is in real life a hunchbacked man with dwarfism, whose character whilst called a dwarf at times or worst (by the villains mostly) once or twice is never played off his appearance but his acting charisma. His girlfriend Malin is a big, statuesque woman, not a conventional thin figure but a big sturdy figure, and there is never a joke about Tadesse and Allikas' visible physical differences as characters as a joke. The Ethiopian setting, even if the cast are cartoonishly post-dubbed, is still people from the country, including the aforementioned individuals playing kung fu experts who are competent, making the comment earlier about wanting African martial arts films something likely to happen one day and being prayed for. Llansó's decision to even have the film partially set in Ethiopia, like a curious Werner Herzog of gonzo weird cinema, is felt with love and with none of the film being patronising, taking in the natural locations and locals as something to admire. Even if the film has characters named Spaghetti and Ravioli, said film is paradoxically also going to make its weirdness progressive and encompassing the world in all forms at the same time.

And returning to the idea earlier, one has to ask what will people reflect in the historical books on the Cold War in a century's time? Here it is reduced to conflicts between unseen figures, where even the C.I.A. will make their agents disposable, burying the bodies in the beach and cremating them in the sand, with the paper masks literally leading to a mask hiding other masks. Will anything from history of that era mean much, as here Llansó has to express it through video game fight scenes and post-dub silliness? Spirituality is strangely more relevant as, whilst he is proven not to be the Messiah, the Jesus here with his boom-box crucifix is the path to freedom and as much shows the meekness not to presume Himself a divinity, merely a guide to help another. More so especially as the film gently falls into subjective reality twists Philip K. Dick might have raised a thumbs up with, as naturally reality as is can be questioned with reality-within-reality-within-reality concerns.

In fact deciding to put everything into the blender like most neo-cult films, with the danger still there of this not having lasting impact, is at least helped because Miguel Llansó has a film which, straightforwardly told for all its weirdness, does have an emotional current and characters we like. With Daniel Tadesse's Gagano as a figure we follow in this farce and feel for, it helps the film especially when it brings in its own weird logic, like the human mouth being used for a credit card machine or Batfro, and having something to follow having to adapt to all this. Certainly, after seeing this film, I have nothing but positivity and optimism for Miguel Llansó as a filmmaker and can see him, if he can, staying in relevance if he works from the virtues here and hones them.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None