An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)

 

Director: Jim Hosking

Screenplay: Jim Hosking and David Wike

Cast: Aubrey Plaza as Lulu Danger; Emile Hirsch as Shane Danger; Jemaine Clement as Colin Keith Threadener; Matt Berry as Rodney von Donkensteiger; Craig Robinson as Beverly Luff Linn; Zachary Cherry as Tyrone Paris; Sky Elobar as Carl Ronk; Jacob Wysocki as Lawrence Doggi; Sam Dissanayake as Adjay Willis

An Abstract List Candidate

It was a pleasure to bring you tampons.

Following on from The Greasy Strangler (2016), director-writer Jim Hosking's transgressive horror-comedy with grotesque humour and large quantities of grease, how do you follow up an idiosyncratic debut feature? This is where the "second album syndrome" issue arises, a concept found in music (hence my choice in term) and other art in how, after your first work catches public attention, having to follow it up and with far less time for the project to digest can lead to disappointment from the audience. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is as strange and idiosyncratic, but there is no male penises, no gore or very explicit sex (baring one scene), and especially no grease. What it is instead is a perverse take on a romantic comedy starring recognisable actors. Something which fits and already paints a unique world Hoskins has created for himself, assisted by co-writer David Wike, but of a different mood.

Lulu (Aubrey Plaza) is the tired wife of Shane Danger (Emile Hirsch), manager of a coffee shop who fires her when upper management demands he cuts a staff member. Left, as a result, by herself watching television at home, she witnesses an advertisement for "a magical night" with Beverly Luff Linn (Craig Robinson), a figure from her past with clear endearment for. Taking advantage of Shane's decision to rob her brother Adjay Willis (Sam Dissanayake), at his vegan food store, of a large sum of money, she takes the money and the man Colin (Jemaine Clement) meant to retrive it back, taking them both to the hotel where Beverly Luff Linn's show will be at. Luff Lin is as weird as The Greasy Strangler, but much more reliant on the dialogue and tone, becoming stranger in a more subdued way. Jim Hoskins' style is fully unique, a minimalistic tone of awkward long takes and crassness which is yet precise.

Not as many people here wander around in just Speedos or nude, though Clement does get to exhibit his manly hair covered form for compensation. However most of what came before in the previous film is here, a contrast between the modernity of real life and it being twisted into a curious form, a lush if gauche aesthetic dominating a film almost entirely set in timeless middle urban America, mostly set at the hotel where the narrative is a boiling pot of emotions and eccentric characters bashing into each other or throwing out insults. Among such figures is Beverly Luff Linn, who is possibly dead or at least in a strange limbo form where his manager and potential lover Rodney von Donkensteiger (Matt Berry) has to least lace his Earl Grey tea with a drug and delay the magical evening's performance due to health issues. That Lulu's presence is affecting Beverly is adding greater tensions for von Donkensteiger which will lead to conflict, especially as her husband with his employees, in wigs, will be looming around the hotel when they know where the money and she went.

A lot of the humour is exaggerating the oddness of human behaviour, with some grossness though toned down from the previous film also with the same tone adding sympathetic light hearted in the midst of this. The only mean thing about Beverly Luff Linn, for all its swearing, is the cast constantly calling each other fat, which might be held as body shaming were it not for Hosking being a director with a much more open minded and thoughtful habit of casting actors of all shapes and sizes, everyone distinct even if as much part of the joke in their absurdness, the result of which causing the use of being fat as an insult taking on the strangeness as childish school ground insults from adults. Hosking's logic as a result can make a joke of Lulu asking Colin to go for tampons for a "heavy flow" come off not as a cheap gross joke but something odder in the punch line, and it says a great deal that the film could jettison the grease and transgression of the previous film, and retain its strangeness.

It is a film that will be more difficult for many to appreciate, truly the difficult second project as it does not have the instant saleability, paradoxically enough, of being so shocking you have to see it. It instead has a different form of weirdness in how the little details are meant to be jokes even if a curious ha-ha form, like the coffee shop selling a mid-winter blend. As well, the fact the director Hoskins is British, using American iconography, also means that a lot of the film and the previous is likely drawing from a very quaint absurdity part of our humour. That and, for a film set in the middle of middle America, the punch line being the magical night involving Scottish songs lamenting becoming a football referee becomes funnier in its co-production context, stranger in hindsight the longer I think of the film, weirder than its post-relevant disco music or the main receptionist at the hotel having a long hair that gets him mocked as looking like a dog. The cast including recognisable figures also does emphases the genesis of this film's humour - case in point, if you recognise Matt Berry's voice, think of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) and how people who use subtext are cowards - whilst emphasising that, for all its droll and oddly paced humour, the film's melodrama is never merely ironic, but actually sincere in its perverse way. As a result, whilst The Greasy Strangler was a compelling piece, the sophomore production is the one that won me over to Jim Hosking entirely.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Vulgar/Weird

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