Upstream Color
Imagine for a
moment gentle reader that you’re on holiday. You’re on holiday in Switzerland. You’re having a rare old time; it’s a veritable non-stop
orgy of yodelling, fondue and Toblerones.
Then, deep
underground at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two particles collide,
tearing a hole in the fabric of space-time, in the very fabric of reality,
sucking you into a parallel universe where Little England’s favourite Sunday
night veterinarian, James Herriot, is plying his trade not in Yorkshire but in Texas
where America’s Greatest Living Filmmaker, Terrence Malick, hires him to write a paranoid sci-fi
love story. With cute pigs.
While that’s not
the story behind writer/director Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, the beautiful, mesmerising, meandering
follow-up to 2008’s hugely overrated, low-fi sci-fi Primer, it might have been more fun.
Described
by Sundance’s publicists as “A man and woman are drawn together, entangled
in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they
struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives,” Carruth’s Upstream Color strives for ambiguity with a
would-be existential romance that asks all the expected, obvious questions
about love, memory, identity and freewill beloved of American Indie filmmakers
while stirring in a dash of tasteful Cronenberg-style body horror to keep
things fresh.
An
unscrupulous con-man (Thiago Martins) cultivates bizarrely narcotic maggots
which he force-feeds to our heroine Kris (Amy Seimetz), drugging and hypnotising
her, emptying her bank accounts and causing the loss of her job, leaving her
infested with psychotropic, telepathic worms which she tries to cut from her
own body before an enigmatic scientist/vet (Andrew Sensening) removes and transplants them
into a cute little pig he keeps in an enclosure with her porcine friends.
Trying
to rebuild her shattered life, Kris meets and falls in love with Jeff (Shane
Carruth),
whose body bears similar scars to her own and may just be a victim of the same
weird experiments as her. As their
relationship develops, their memories and identities melt and merge, causing
them to descend into fear and paranoia and forcing Kris to take drastic action.
Never
as clever or fascinating as it thinks it is or as tricky or complex as its
rapturous reviews would suggest, Upstream Color is an elliptical, deliberately obtuse,
woozily pretty film that, despite its sophomoric pretentiousness, succeeds in
intriguing without being anywhere near as involving as it should be.
Seimetz
is as wonderful here as she was in Adam Wingard’s A Horrible Way To Die or her numerous mumblecore
outings, her Kris is vulnerable, damaged, hesitant, courageous, while the
surprisingly charismatic Carruth acquits himself well as her spiky suitor, the
two making an affecting, edgily sweet couple whose hesitant romance you want to
see succeed. Less successful
however is Carruth’s sci-fi elements which lend Upstream Color a heavy-handed
quasi-religiosity not unlike Malick’s recent films (The Tree Of Life, To The
Wonder). An undeniably hypnotic, technically
brilliant (it’s one of the most densely edited films you’ll see this year),
aesthetically gorgeous, sensual piece of cinema, Upstream Color also somehow manages to be
ponderous, a little too smug, too impressed with itself. An exercise in cod-profundity.
Bold,
baffling, enthralling, frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying, Upstream
Color is a
willfully obtuse piece of work that seems determined to make you feel
something, anything, despite itself.
And if you don’t fall in love with Seimetz, you’ll definitely fall for
those pigs.
David Watson
Written &
directed by:
Shane Carruth
Produced by:
Shane
Carruth, Casey Gooden, Ben LeClair, Scott Douglass
Starring:
Amy Seimetz,
Shane Carruth
Genre:
Sci-fi,
Romance, Indie
Language:
English
Runtime:
96 minutes
Rating:
2/5
Originally published at http://www.filmjuice.com/upstream-color/
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