Me Too (2012)

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

Screenplay: Aleksey Balabanov

Cast: Aleksandr Mosin as Sanya; Oleg Garkusha as Oleg the musician; Yuriy Matveev as Yura Matveev; Alisa Shitikova as Alisa; Jurij Matveyev as Jura; Viktor Gorbunov as Jura's Father

Canon Fodder

 

It's easier to find work for your asshole.

[Major Plot Spoilers Throughout]

Aleksey Balabanov's last film as a director opens with one man killing four others at night with ease in the opening, yet switching to another figure collecting fir tree oil for a purpose, Me Too is a very unconventional film for Aleksey Balabanov's last. This is a reimagining of Stalker (1979­), Andrei Tarkovsky's legendary reinterpretation of Roadside Picnic (1972), the science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky he transferred into an abstract philosophical journey, very different from the exceptional source material itself, and one of the best sci-fi films ever made. Here in place of the Zone is the Bell Tower of Happiness, between Uglich and St. Petersberg, an environment affected by electromagnetic radiation that killed all the human beings, leaving the environment too in a permanent winter.

A band of male misfits - one gangster named Sanya (Aleksandr Mosin), a musician Oleg (Oleg Garkusha), Jura (Jurij Matveyev), who is an alcoholic sprung from a recovery clinic, and Jura's father (Viktor Gorbunov) - intend to travel to the Bell Tower, said to transport people far away, never to come back, to a better place. Among this band of misfits, also add Alisa (Alisa Shitikova), a sex worker fleeing from her life, originally a university student who could not get work in her desired field, ending up picked up and tagging along in this journey for a purpose. This interpretation is unlike Tarkovsky and Stalker in a lot of ways to avoid becoming plagiarism, in that this is a Balabanov in tone, including how like The Stoker (2010), there is a huge emphasis on music playing over long scenes of movie from locations, and in general, a very breezy tone in the first half when it is the road trip to get to the central location. Me Too is a curious finale to its director's career in terms of an abstract metaphorical journey, which is what makes it different from his other work,

Me Too too, whilst ultimate a sombre film, does challenge one last time as a Aleksey Balabanov production, as you have to contend with how Balabanov throughout his career had moments which are uncomfortable, forcing one to ask if he was challenging the viewer, believed this characters, or was deliberately attacking political correctness in a misinformed creative decision. It was something I have had to think about first since one line in Brother 2 (2000) was a jarring piece of dialogue that raised this question, and here it is our lead Sanya who is not a good person. In particular, one monologue which Balabanov stays on, will raise questions from viewers to why it is in the film, that about a gay club where he shot a gay man at, an unpleasant piece told by the character as a joke, and odd to even include. He also cruelly suggests to Alisa that the Bell Tower will not transport women unless naked, leading to her doing so in her own quest for a better life, revealed as as a joke when she meets them up again. Adding to this one character's racist streak, and these are not a likable group in some ways, but it is Sanja significantly who is going to put viewers off from the first half. That he is ultimately the central character will raise a question to what Balabanov's intentions are.

This is a challenge to get into, but as with Balabanov's cinema in general, in one hand he has this uncomfortable moments which raise concerns of his art, in the other he challenges this, as for the most part, everyone else but Sanja is not a horrible person, merely a miscreant who wishes for happiness, unable to find such and wishing to leave through the Bell Tower. Referring the 2012 doomsday conspiracy, these are lost people, Jura trying to even rationalise the world at one point by connecting God, Charles Darwin, aliens, dinosaurs and a mass of idiosyncratic takes on history at one point in front of a campfire, whilst Oleg is a Christian. Jura as the sole female character is a lost figure, absolutely sympathetic, wishing for more, and when they get to the outside of the "Zone", unlike Tarkovsky's which was guarding by the military, said military here blankly say that they are welcomed in. They do not care about another entering, as if the environment is an inconvenience they have to professional guard, only warning people who wish to traverse inside, like gatekeepers, which no one has ever returned.

This zone is strange and compelling from Aleksey Balabanov, truly closer to his earlier work when it is a frozen wilderness of abandoned buildings, where the animals have survived but there are corpses everywhere, including of those who wished to find the Bell Tower but were stuck. The Bell Tower is explicitly supernatural, and those who are accepted are turned into puffs of smoke out of the top. The film, challenging its problematic content of the first half, offers the ultimate of challenge when it is Sanja, out of them all, who is refused entry and stuck outside, wandering unsure of himself. It is explicit that his crimes as a criminal, a bandit, have prevented him from entering, and makes the uncomfortable actions and words of his from the first half more striking in that he is the refused a heaven.

It is also here Aleksey Balabanov's career ends with a befitting finale that adds more questions, before his premature death in 2013, where he himself makes a cameo as another refused into the Bell Tower. Playing a film director, poignantly he is the sole person left to console Sanja, as someone who is not transported and yet wants happiness. Though Sanja is indefensible as a character, when he is left lost you as the viewer are still stuck with having to see the world from this abandoned figure, likely to die in this Zone from the radiation. That as an image and finale, with its clear symbolic meaning, startles in what is suggests of everything, including the problematic moments of before.

It again evokes the nihilism of the director's work which undercut those moments disconcerting of his career, an acceptance that his characters were not likable, but still figures lost and stuck in a world. His take on Russia, his homeland, was bleak, and anything we as viewers were uncomfortable with also came in mind that he never glossed over this side of the country either, for good art or bad. If anything changed for the finale film, it is contrasted by a melancholia which, dare says it, is sympathetic for those not deserving sympathy, which is the most enigmatic of finales and a real provocation. It is a film that many will struggle with, for it is the final film for an artist, which are usually the most enigmatic of a creator's, the one which raises questions and causes divide. They are usually some of the most fascinating, and likewise Me Too is the case. Always the less well regarded or obscure, whether intended as the final film or not, these including outside of cinema tend to be the most unconventional and for me some of the most compelling. The journey with Aleksey Balabanov has been challenging, rewarding and is not yet finished, even in mind sadly his cinema is not readily available, including in how it is more complex with the films less readily available, but Me Too was a perfect final chapter in what it brought in terms of questions left asks and puzzles to consider.

Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road (2002)

 

Director: Bob Gale

Screenplay: Bob Gale

Cast: James Marsden as Neal Oliver; Gary Oldman as O.W. Grant; Amy Smart as Lynn Linden; Christopher Lloyd as Ray; Chris Cooper as Bob Cody; Kurt Russell as Captain Ives; Michael J. Fox as Mr. Baker; Ann-Margret as Mrs. James; Amy Jo Johnson as Laura

An Abstract Film Candidate

Are you saying Phil will be cleaning toilets...and have no sex drive...?

Digging into the corners and crevices of cinema, you find yourself discovering the likes of this. A film from the co-writer of Back to the Future (1985) in his directorial debut, Bob Gale, a whimsical magical realist road movie which on the surface is a family friendly romp, in which a young man named Neal (James Marsden) after his twenty second birthday wishes to find answers, only for Gary Oldman as a magical wish fulfiller, the son of a leprechaun emigrating to the Americas from Ireland and a Cheyenne Indian, to push him onwards to a road journey across an interstate not on the map. It is, on paper, as much an Alice in Wonderland scenario as well as a surreal journey, between a museum of art forgeries to the town of lawyers, which is full of litigation as you can imagine, among the sights witnessed. It proves, despite its sheen and whimsy, to be odder than that.

It is also written for adults only, which is one detail among many which cause Interstate 60 to become a cultural oddity in cinema, in between cursing in the script to the fact that Oldman's immortal prankster O.W. Grant laments at one point having had his penis was cut off in a weird accident at nine. Oddly un-commercial Hollywood films are rare, especially rarer from the 2000s onward, so there is something compelling about this one even if it is an acquired taste you groan at as much as find merit in. Marsden's Neal is at the centre, the son of a lawyer of a well off family, wishing to become an artist, at a crossroads in his life and being railroaded by his father into law school and his life, even buying him for his birthday the red car he himself would want. To the viewer, a character like Neal, a stereotypical white middle class young guy, is going to be off-putting because such figures are gauche as protagonists, especially as his journey, when kicked off by Christopher Lloyd assigning him to deliver a package across Interstate 60, is a cliché. One with the added cliché of the chance of meeting the woman of his dreams, played by Amy Smart, a figure mostly seen on billboards only Neal can see, guiding him in their messages.

The result is, blatantly, a metaphor for Neal's personal grown, with his father's preferred red convertible (not his own choice) transporting him on this odyssey, Gale uses it to have characters Neal meets spin conservative, homespun advice on life, not attempting remotely to hide his design to spin meanings in his whimsical journey. The journey, as someone obsessed with surreal Wonderland/journey narratives in art, was always going to be compelling for me as, even here, they are idiosyncratic. It is for the most quite creative and even funny - particularly as the lawyer town, where everyone who is not a local gets slapped with a lawsuit for running over the mayor's dog which does not exist, and that lawyers sulk the streets on mass asking for clients - and whilst heavy handed, many of the eccentrics Neal encounters and the places he find are interesting.

Right from a stop sign, on his way to "Danver", Neal is already encountering a man who wished to be able to eat all the time, eventually stuck in a monkey's paw scenario of having a gut like a black hole, to a town called Banton (with Kurt Russell as the police chief) where drugs are legalised, creating one named Euphoria legal only in its region for anyone over thirteen, warned of in its addictive properties constantly but left for anyone who wishes to get high to take, the addicts cheap labour to pay for their now permanently addiction. Even if the film is heavy handed, even heavy handed surreal and metaphorical worlds are interesting for me, particularly as this film decides to go for a scenario of directions Neal could take in his life and see how ill advised they are for him. The only one of the encounters which is not well thought out, or just one of the times the more adult humour is in poor taste can be, is the personification of lust, a female hitchhiker played by Power Rangers alumni Amy Jo Johnson, looking surprisingly like Natalie Portman, playing a young woman searching for the Perfect 10 in bed, a scene which could be read as sexist depending on your mood and does not work as well as it could have.

Gale as a director is not as idiosyncratic as his script, at least in the sense that his visual and directorial ambitions are solid but they are propped up by the imagination onscreen. The film is given the advantage that it is a well made film with large production value, adding to the weirdness of this film's entire existence. Plotted as a road movie, but also an absurd journey, it is helped every scenario is heightened. It is a world of Americana - diners, giant bill boards - and runs with them to good effect, such as the idea, based on bizarre roadside attractions, of the museum of Art Forgeries, which is revealed to actually have real works of art with copies sent to real art galleries. The film is peculiar, as all of this film is felt with a whimsy apt for the co-writer of Back to the Future, but all these odd and subject to being tonally off too at moments, such as the tangent (never brought back again) of the main wish giving character having no penis, or the ouroboros weirdness surrounding a killer on the loose which leads to doppelgangers, almost something David Lynch if the tone has fully committed to a darker work. The film belies being a vehicle for James Marsden, who would stand out in this period playing Cyclops in the X-Men (2000), the first major superhero film of the Millennium, as the happy-go-lucky lead with a magic 8-ball guiding him going on this journey for self discovery.

It is also odd seeing Gary Oldman, a serious actor, having a lark with dyed red hair, but around this time was also Tiptoes (2003), a film in the career of screenwriter/director Matthew Bright where Oldman played Matthew McConaughey's brother born with dwarfism, which in a film which cast actors with dwarfism you had Oldman on his knees off-camera with co-stars, something to remind myself that Oldman also has a penchant for weirdness. Christopher Lloyd is not necessarily stretching himself, among this strangeness, but he has always been a charismatic actor, and in a film from the screenwriter of Back to the Future, it is not a surprise he is here, as is a brief cameo by Michael J. Fox as a businessman only to be run over by a trunk in a monkey's paw scenario. Also worthy of mention is Chris Cooper, playing a former advertising creator with terminal lung cancer who, alongside demanding truth in everything, has also strapped a belt of explosives around his waist set to a timer. Whether that joke can still be funny nowadays, it is nonetheless Cooper as an interesting character actor shining in his scenes, a straight man in this peculiar production. The only person in the cast who feels left out of place is tragically Amy Smart, as the sole woman of great plot important in what is frankly a white male Americana tale, not an insult to Interstate 60 but blatantly obvious in its DNA. Even if they make a comment of her not being the romanticised ideal of a woman, through a curiously used fart gag, Smart is still stuck with a bland figure, mostly seen as billboards that can change and guide Neal around, but never standing out.

Interstate 60 is definitely a curiosity, and in truth these forgotten obscurities for myself are far more compelling to experience over masterpieces at times, especially as this feels like a more honest snapshot just to peek in Bob Gale's brain. Parts of Interstate 60 are cringe worthy. Some of the jokes have not aged well, such as Smart suddenly talking in a way that would make, as Neal states, Mike Tyson seem eloquent just for a joke (and even referencing that in this sentence feels uncomfortable to have done readers). Some of it is clichéd yearnings of what life should mean, all of which feel like Bob Gale is lecturing his viewers. Yet it is all aptly personal, also aptly part of the Americana the film is touching at, the absurdities and men with cartoon dynamite strapped around their waists as part of their culture as the diners and the red convertibles are, even the magic 8-ball and a man eating beyond his weight in food in a bet and the strange museums part of this mass of culture.

It is a film that was never going to be a success because it is unmistakably weird. I have to admire its idiosyncratic take on the type of American comedy however, even in mind to what does not work, where this goes on a road journey to find humility even if absurd. It even still finds some apt and surprisingly salient aspects along the way, in spite of being antiquated, such as Cooper's character evoking historian Frederick Turner, expressing the idea that the frontier was a place for the malcontent to escape to and that, far from a gateway, the internet would not help replace it when there was no more physical frontier. Definitely in terms of unconventional American films of any budget, I would find virtue in the likes of this, even in mind to its failures, always more fascinating than many of the more successful productions due to their idiosyncrasies to genres and tropes. Even if the film, for all its early 2000s sheen and soundtrack, feels like a film from an older man out of touch to the world, it fascinates as much as causes one to roll your eyes at.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

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

The Brown Bunny (2003)

From https://posteritati.com/posters/000/000/
053/717/the-brown-bunny-md-web.jpg

Director: Vincent Gallo

Screenplay: Vincent Gallo

Cast: Vincent Gallo as Bud Clay; Chloë Sevigny as Daisy; Cheryl Tiegs as Lilly; Elizabeth Blake as Rose; Anna Vareschi as Violet; Mary Morasky as Mrs. Lemon

The Brown Bunny...a very banal title, actually in reference to a pet rabbit the main female character had, this figure the obsession of motorcycle racer Bud Clay (Vincent Gallo) who only materialises as Chloë Sevigny near the end but instead becomes a spectre hanging around this existential, slow cinema mystery. The term "Brown Bunny" however, if referenced amongst knowledgeable cineastes, evokes one of the most infamous premieres at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival where the second directorial feature of character actor Vincent Gallo played. Gallo is someone who has always come across as deliberately annoying or offending people on purpose, rather than a lot more problematic figures in cinema history who have actually done absolutely despicable things or sincerely say offensive ideas under the guise they sincerely believe in them. If "shit stirring" every got into the English dictionary, Vincent Gallo's portrait should be sat next to the definition just in lieu to how the fallout to The Brown Bunny screening went, between the apparent caterwauling and boos from critics, to the ongoing trading of barbed witticisms between Gallo and the late film critic Roger Ebert.

Question is, did The Brown Bunny have any actual merit beyond the controversy, stemming from the notorious ending sequence involving explicit (real) oral sex,and what does one reflect upon when you revisit the film a decade plus after its buzz of notoriety?

The immediate issue with that answer is that, well, ninety percent of the film is incredibly minimal almost experimental (if not experimental) cinema which is entirely on mood, and eventually is dependent on that finale to work. Aware the notorious Cannes cut was originally around two hours, having thirty minutes trimmed away in places like the opening race, a lot of The Brown Bunny is Gallo in character driving around various locations in numerous US states, a cross between Chris Petit's 1979 minimalist road movie Radio On, right down to vignettes with characters the protagonist encounters, with an extreme interpretation of Michelangelo Antonioni, befitting as set in the US and a desert at one point this immediately evokes Zabriskie Point (1970) if the Italian maestro had gutted all the free love and counterculture symbolism of that film.

Of actual praise, on the get go, is that The Brown Bunny is at least incredibly well made with a distinctive style, really emphasising the bold creativity of American independent cinema even into the 2000s. Gallo shot the film in 16mm and as a result, with every shot looking like it was sun kissed, the grainy images created are absolutely enticing. In the malaise the entire film is, a languid pace of minimal dialogue and that which is there through Gallo being very quiet onscreen, it would be easy to block out how much of the American landscape is also used, from the urban to the rural, from motorways to suburbia, or how appropriately melancholic and effective the soundtrack choices are, particularly the country songs.

From https://assets.mubi.com/images/notebook/
post_images/21379/images-w1400.jpg?1463290375

Gallo, in spite of his reputation and notoriety back at this time, which including (whether serious or not) rumours of him wanting to sell his own semen or bigger controversies of him saying offensive comments, had a fascinating career as a character actor. He's not been helped by his bluntness or his lack of filter in his comments, which has imbued accusations of being an utter egotist. Yet you look at his filmography and its fascinating - he has been with Claire Denis in her English/bilingual films with the exception of High Life (2018), like Trouble Every Day (2001); he made an impression in Emir Kusturica's American film Arizona Dreams (1993) just for the scene where he recreates the crop-duster sequence from North By Northwest (1959) onstage; or his interesting turn in Tetro (2009), one of Francis Ford Coppola's "experimental" films. He is also in The Brown Bunny, for any accusations of ego onscreen or how uncomfortable the finale scenes are, incredibly quiet and even isolated in terms of how he plays the character of Bud Clay, to the point of extreme introversion that few director-writer-actors would willingly want to portray. Even if introversion can be egotistical, a woo-is-me aura that could accidentally be created or unconscious, Gallo's scenes with the few character interactions with his mumbling and guardedness are so distinct especially when little of the film is with any "action" or "scenario" that the mood tempers this potential issue.

The content of the first three-quarters is entirely minimalistic - starting with the aforementioned scene of Gallo racing, and spending his time drifting across the country aimlessly. He shuns most contact, as with the case of passing various female sex workers on the street, or acts in a difficult strained way, asking the last of the former he meets to just follow him about before he abruptly changes his mind. A character called Daisy (Chloë Sevigny) is for the most part an off-screen figure, known only through her elderly parents and the titular bunny. It's slow, at times exasperating, yet its intentionally a mood piece, coincidentally running current to a trend in Gus Van Sant's filmography of a similar style, between Gerry (2002) and Paranoid Park (2007), of a similar obfuscation and emphasis on mood. The exact slow pace of time is felt according to regular time outside of cinema in The Brown Bunny, the emotion more found in that aforementioned score. Also in lieu to where the film ultimately leads to, a tragedy that haunts the lead, The Brown Bunny ultimately is a film structured on this trauma and only wraps together coherently depending on its reveal.

[Major Spoiler Warning]

Of course, the denouement is notorious for, when Daisy finally appears, an explicit sex scene including actual oral that riled up many*. It was a huge risk for Chloë Sevigny, as an actress with a considerable stature at the time of the film, where a huge distinction is still made between actresses in cinema and actresses who star in adult films where real sex takes place; even those films which have real sex that aren't in the adult genre, it is still a tendency of non-actors or unknowns, as Canadian broadcaster Sook-Yin Lee found when, staring in Shortbus (2006), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation considered firing her for that film's real sex scenes she participated in until fans and celebrities criticised them. Thankfully, having talked about this film in the last few years, Chloë Sevigny not only has no regrets about The Brown Bunny, saying the scene was done with care for her concerns, but also, as an actress I have always liked, she's never been out of work.

It's also an uncomfortable sequence because Gallo's character starts using misogynistic language in the midst of it, with violence felt within the scene, but its revealed as the damaged trauma of a boyfriend who lost his girlfriend (and unborn child) in the midst of a part where she was gang raped, a literal phantom as he ends up curled up in the foetal position in that room.

[Spoilers End]

The finale, when all the reasons behind Gallo's character acting his way is revealed, is abrupt, never brought up as little premonitions in the film before, and all a sudden jolt after the trance of before. Does it work? Entirely subjective, but Gallo's at least trying a very complex characterisation. Any accusations of ego is also undercut by how much of the film he (even if unintentional) comes off as vulnerable and disconnected from his environment; and in lieu to the revelation, he builds and argubly justifies why the film is structured as it is. Its, from then on, where it is subjective; a lot of the notoriety and anger at Cannes, the crowds there at a drop of a pin to jeer an unconventional film by all accounts, just comes from how extremely glacial the initial cut probably was and, yeah, the whole issue of depicting real sex in cinema with two known actors. In truth, with the layer of subjectivity that can be a virtue and a flaw with American independent cinema, it's so open to interpretation you the viewer are forced to think about The Brown Bunny long afterwards. No wonder Gallo took his ball home after the welcome he got, whether you agree with this review or hate the film - he only made one other film after this at this point in his career, Promises Written in Water (2010), which he screened at the Venice Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, but purposely hasn't released it since.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalistic

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

From http://motorcycleboy.fr/wp-content/uploads/
2015/02/TBB_02__1422994718_2.216.89.3.jpg