Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with Sheldrake who has returned to spill more on the Genart Film Festival. This time he examines a dark comedy that got a lot of good word out of Sundance (and some mixed, too, but those that liked it really, really liked it) called WRISTCUTTERS (I believe it was called WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY when it played Sundance... guess they kept the cutting and dropped the love). Anyway, enough with the parentheses... here's Sheldrake!
WRISTCUTTERS
Director and Writer: Goran Dukic
From a short story “Kneller's Happy Campers” by Etgar Keret (Israeli)
Screenplay: April 7th, 2006
2006 New York GENART FILM FESTIVAL
Sheldrake here, reporting to you live from New York and the GENART Film Festival. Tonight we left the Ziegfeld behind and moved the action downtown to the Chelsea West at 23rd Street off Eighth Avenue off. I was living down here once about twenty years ago with a roommate who couldn’t keep his hands off the terminal gear. He tried to jump off our 20-story balcony twice, went nuts and took a stab, if you will, at sticking the good steak knife (the serrated one) through his own heart and I walked at LEAST twice into an apartment with towels stuffed under the doors, the whole place reeking of oven gas. Have to hand it to him, though, the rent was always on time. Oh wait, it was his place and I was broke. That’s right. I think. Anyway, whoever the place belonged to, he pretty much set the bar for Difficult Roommates. He disappeared a long time ago and I always wondered what happened to him. Now I know. Read on.
I loved WRISTCUTTERS, a sinister, fun, loopy, totally subversive road movie made with a crummy grainy washed out look (created by pushing the primary colors, all you Tisch and UCLA film students) that casts an appropriate glaring pall over the story and world of the movie: appropriate because this is a movie that puts you in the world where you go right AFTER you slash your wrists, a world that’s perfect punishment for the sin the self-offed have committed because it’s “just the same, but everything’s a little bit worse.” One of the funnier things the director said after film during the Q&A was that the most important note he gave the production designer was that anything that appeared in the movie—cars, trees, buildings, landscapes--had to be “something that absolutely no one would want.” It is in fact the world of the suicidally depressed, because, gee, that’s how they saw life in the first place, wasn’t it? So now they’re gonna be forced to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes while big-daddy, the People In Charge, keep watch over you. It’s for your own good. In other words, this place isn’t hell, it’s Purgatory. It’s that everything is just a little worse that makes this a comedy, since the usual idea of Hell is that of torments too great for us to bear in this life that makes us suitable to move on from the Regular Player level to Expert. The torments the afterlife of WRISTCUTTERS aren’t too great to bear, they’re just annoying. Depressing. Soul-crushing.
The term purgatory in accordance with Catholic teaching, is "a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God's grace are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions." [1] In the suicide’s afterworld in WRISTCUTTERS there are no stars in their night sky, and though small miracles happen, they only happen when they don’t matter at all, and when you don’t care about them. There’s always something wrong with anything you have, every plant is dead or dying and no one smiles, ever.
THE STORY. The movie’s hero Zia (PATRICK FUGIT) is a young man who’s just been dumped by his girlfriend Desiree (LESLIE BIBB), and it’s too much for him to bear, so he slices open the wrist fountains, dumps his precious bodily fluids into the sink and next thing we know he’s got a crappy job working at a fast food joint in a place too dumpy to be Hell, which is the only way you know it’s not. One day he finds out that, after he offed, Desiree decided she’d made a mistake and couldn’t live without HIM, and then she offed—so odds are she’s in this crumbling afterworld too, and he takes off looking for her, for Desiree (read Desire, get it?) with his Russian pal Eugene (SHEA WIGHAM), whose family situation in the afterlife is one of the best grim jokes in a very funny grim movie. On the road they meet the beautiful but tough Mikal (SHANNYN SOSSAMON). Mikal just wants to find The People In Charge because she had no intention of killing herself, she was just shooting up a little arm candy for the very first time and you can’t really count that as a suicide, can you? On the road they run into a camp led by a mysterious low-key man named Kneller (TOM WAITS), and it’s here the three travelers begin to run into supernatural forces. While at the camp, they hear about a Messiah (WILL ARNETT) down the road who’s going to pull off a REAL miracle—he’s figured out a way to get out of this place, and maybe, just maybe, a way to get back home. And so Kneller’s camp disbands and joins a larger crowd assembled at the edge of their reality, all waiting for the miracle their lone Messiah has promised to perform in front of them.
WRISTCUTTERS was made by an Israeli director (GORAN DUKIC) from a short story by an Israeli author (ETGAR KERET), but this story is wholly American in its look and feel, and JIM JARMUSCH is its godfather, especially his masterpiece DOWN BY LAW,. Something tells me the whole off-kilter look and feel of the movie wouldn’t hold up as well as it does, which is very well indeed, if TOM WAITS wasn’t cast as a major character in the movie. His whole falling apart at the seams, croaky personality is the visible spirit of this movie; and, anyway, who’s a more likely suicide than an alcoholic saloon piano player? The movie somehow makes a hole that demands his presence, as if any other actor would have been physically rejected from the celluloid (or whatever) if he’d tried to take Wait’s place.
This thing got major audience raves at Sundance and was a huge audience favorite, and no wonder. It’s funny, twisted and spirited. If you like JJ’s work, you’ll find this movie is more work in that imaginative vein, without being derivative. It’s also just funny as hell. Go see it when it comes out.
CHECK OUT the funny cameo by Jake Busey whose character still wants to collect the money that he loaned Zia in the prior life.
Mr. Sheldrake
New York, New York
April 2006
More good news: GENART has a great daily video podcast of the festival you can get by going to this site. Then click on video podcast and let itunes launch - then subscribe. You can get interviews and other cool content about the festival here.
