Crumbs (2015)

 

Director: Miguel Llansó

Screenplay: Miguel Llansó (with translation by Daniel Worku)

Cast: Daniel Tadesse as Candy; Selam Tesfayie as Sayat; Mengistu Berhanu as the Shop Owner; Shitaye Abraha as the Witch; Tsegaye Abegaz as Santa Claus; Girma Gebrehiwot as The Man Who Listens

An Abstract Candidate

 

Miguel Llansó returns, although in this case the older title far from being advanced from actually proves to be a Rosetta stone for getting more out of the later (better known) Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019). I still like the later immensely, but Crumbs became the favourite of the two immediately.

It is effectively an Ethiopian set sci-fi film, but the obvious thing to notice is how much Western pop culture is deliberately included. This could have easily been trite, like many post-post-modern illustrative artists I have seen on sites like Juxtapoz magazine that, whilst still are great illustrations, are beholden to knowing what the symbolism is. I have always worried, maybe irrationally, that especially in the modern day where "content" and "stuff" is more of a concern for companies to pump out to audiences, not dissimilar at all to the goods produced cheaply in pound stores or more expensive boutiques, whether any of this material will be left for scholars in a thousand of years or not, even that which is loved and became art to its fans. I am also someone who actually, on the opposite side to that opinion, as an admirer of Surrealism's ethos including admiring low culture, someone who would wish for even the content itself to celebrated even if just manufactured, that as long as there is a way to turn something into art, it is worth saving even if to be deliberately camp or perverse. A lot of the illustrations or art I have seen however, from the likes of Juxtapoz, whilst still good sadly still are beholden to their symbolism needing to be known with not much else between the lines, which would be a nightmare for scholars a hundred years down the line to appreciate even with context, and just an excuse for perverting brand names in surreal psychedelic imagery. Here with Crumbs however, there is something more profound in the end.

The absurdity is there. Actor Daniel Tadesse returns, and this time he has to locate Santa Claus to get tickets for the spaceship to return to his home, whilst his love interest Selam Tesfayie prays to the holy shrine of basketball legend Michael Jordan and lives in a bowling alley where it has seemingly come to life on its own will. This is film where, in terms of one-off imagery, an Ethiopian Santa Claus (played by Tsegaye Abegaz) smashing a children's bicycle in the head of someone wearing a Superman costume is something I actually witnessed and can write about. However, glacial and a road movie in its own way, there is something much more profound about Crumbs which means more.

It is felt fully when, far later in the short feature length film's narrative, we enter a cinema which has been playing a Turkish rip-off of Superman continuously. In a world where no one really remembers the past, believing a toy children's sword or a Donatello ninja turtle figurine are all artefacts of ancient warriors, this offers as much as its narrative the subtext that the artefacts we churned out on mass in our pass, whether of worth or cheap pound store junk, lasts a hundred years down the line (especially if made of plastic) and now is found by the survivors in this world. Here Michael Jackson is not the figure we have him as, controversial yet a huge mega star, but a legendary singer presumed to have been a farmer at the same time he made the Dangerous (1991). If anything, Llansó offers the perfect attitude to how to deal with pop culture in art. Name drop the material, which if you get adds new layers, but force them in a strange scenario where name or brand recognition are not the point but how these objects are reinterpreted in the environment. It is perfect in dealing with a problem, especially with this era now we have to add post to post-modernism, which is going to befall media which attempts to deal with all the culture around it that has been made and still will be.

More so as, in the other virtue of Crumbs, Llansó found enough surreality and scale in the real world. I liked Jesus Shows... immensely, but Crumbs wins out between the two for managing to find real life locations straight from a dream reality. Staying entirely in the country of Ethiopia, it is subversive and profound in itself to have this story in this country, where the cast of local actors of the territory and they get to play out a scenario with this much imagination. The manmade environment around them itself, as someone who admits to having had dreams of strange buildings made from the most banal of places like supermarkets, are just as evocative as the strange content the director-writer added himself. Railway tracks nearly to sink in the sea, the bowling alley itself is an atmospheric place where a bowling ball randomly rolls down a corridor by its own will, and there is the stunning if lived-in zoo where Santa is found. That last location, a masterstroke for the production to have found, is a vast extravagantly decorated environment found in the country of Ethiopia which offers far more production value than if made from CGI. As much as the film is deeply silly on purpose, like this being a world of a "Justin Bieber IV" existing, it both has a greater weight of imagination due to the production values the filmmaker found (or found in a discount store) but also a salient political commentary that is inherently within this material.

In this world in particularly, the apocalypse which we learn of that transpires did not really effect a lot. The metropolises and environments are abandoned, but the habitants have survived, with none of the gravity of a film set in a Western first world country like the United States saying everything would be a disaster. No one cares what has happened, and so much plastic or pot materials left after the end's wake is now more valuable than it was back when civilisation existed. The greater concern here now is being attacked by someone whilst you acquire a Christmas tree for your love one's collection of dwarf trees. Even Nazi imagery, one character wearing a Nazi uniform with Mickey Mouse ears and a gas mask, is no longer threatening in the end of the world, not even able to convince the store owner who sells artefacts the pay more by threatening him with a toy gun, and the traditional folklore and culture is still able to survive. A witch exists, and still thrives, only now she has the benefit to having a ceramic cup to drink from and little trinkets to be paid with. Even a figure like Michael Jordan now is a deity here to light incense to, rather than just the legendary basketball and Space Jam (1996) forgotten about.

It is also of note that, in a country like Ethiopia or non-Western countries, the complete saturation of our pop culture bleeding into theirs is inherently political for how it is matter of fact and has no power, merely objects in the background or trade. It evokes the film ‎Alipato: The Very Brief Life of an Ember (2016), from the Philippines director Khavn De La Cruz, in that for all its tragedy and surrealism another aspect I still remember is how, in its great production value, there was so much noticeable American pop culture (branded clothes from the likes of Pixar's Cars) among the trash and debris of its mostly impoverished or homeless cast. It disconcerts how much of the consumer goods floods of ours flood other countries, but it is thankfully not as powerful as we fear, as they will eventually become meaningless or at least not merely something to have to buy, merely symbols having to fight with others based on an individual's priority rather than what it sold to them. It is befitting, returning back to the Superman imagery here, Superman becomes a symbol of hope and virtue in this world, which would make the DC characters' original creators still proud, but that the Turkish knock-off is shown, still liable in itself to have inspired a young child in Turkey as much as the American Christopher Reeves films of bigger budgets.

Crumbs in itself, whilst also hilarious and a thing of beauty, gains a lot from this, and it now makes the more accessibly weird Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway more meaningful as it was in this exact tone of using pop culture, taking Soviet cold war era paranoia and its pop culture and smashing it together. Knowing as well that Miguel Llansó can slow down, let you breathe in a fully fleshed out world seen in less than seventy minutes as much as throw you through the lunacy of the later film, itself is fantastic as it means he is capable of being unpredictable and entice with what he can do with this distinct aesthetic attitude.

Abstract Spectrum: Contemplative/Post-Modern/Weird

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

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