Stand Clear of the Closing Doors

Hurricane Sandy photos of the floodwaters in the NY subway, October 29, 2012

STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING DOORS      B+                       

USA  (102 mi)  2013  d:  Sam Fleischner          Official site

While the title doesn’t lend itself to greatness, or even anything out of the ordinary, but this film is anything but ordinary.  Taking a cue from Morris Engel’s groundbreaking film Little Fugitive (1953), which uses a cinéma-vérité documentary style for a fictionalized tale about a 7-year old child who gets lost overnight at Coney Island, seen from the child’s perspective, Fleischner’s naturalistic style accentuates the worldly conditions surrounding a 13-year old Mexican boy Ricky (Jesus Sanchez-Velez, a non-professional actor with Asperger syndrome) on the autism spectrum who gets lost in the city of New York.  What’s particularly interesting is we’re not just seeing the world as a child would see it, but as an autistic child, where the sensory conditions are clearly heightened.  Inspired by the many stories of kids on the autism spectrum who wandered off from school or their homes, the outcome is often tragic, yet they are an inevitable thread of the world around us, largely unseen where they may as well be perceived as invisible, especially a child of color who is all but ignored.  Ricky spends most of his time quietly alone, never uttering a word to anyone, drawing pictures of strange and mysterious creatures, even as he lives with his family near the beach of Far Rockaway, Queens, where his mother Mariana (Andrea Suarez Paz) is a house cleaner, his father Ricardo Sr. (Tenoch Huerta Mejía) is away from the home on construction jobs, while his 15-year old sister Carla (Azul Zorrilla) shows little understanding for her brother’s problems, feeling overburdened, growing easily irritated and impatient with always having to deal with him, and is more concerned with her own teenage life.  When she decides to go shopping and “forgets” to pick him up from school one day to walk him home, she believes it’s no big deal, that he’s old enough to get home on his own, but when phone attempts fail, his mother freaks out, knowing he’s all alone out there with nobody to help him.  Unfortunately, when Carla doesn’t show up, Ricky curiously follows a man with what he perceives is a magical dragon symbol on the back of his jacket heading into the subway, leading him onto an extended odyssey continuously riding the A-train to Manhattan and back, becoming a treacherous journey of survival. 

Because he doesn’t know the name of his subway stop, Ricky remains stuck in a kind of Sisyphean purgatory that takes on a life of its own, endlessly repeating his journey for days on end, where the sounds and sights of this subterranean existence are all too familiar to those that ride the subway, often swarming with people seemingly smashed together on subway platforms, while the screeching noise can be overwhelming at times.  As he sits alone connected to ear plugs, we never know what, if anything, he’s listening to while impromptu jazz music echoes through the corridors of the subway station.  While a hip-hop dance routine is performed inside a subway car, the overall mood is one of utter indifference, as a train ride is transitory, a means of getting from one place to another, a temporary inconvenience in terms of a loss of time, where people routinely avoid eye contact or speaking to strangers.  Lost in thought, the film takes on an abstract mosaic of impressionist images, where seen out the window of the front car, upcoming lights are continually changing shape, becoming energy fields that tap into the subconscious, while above ground buildings and roads whiz by instantaneously.  As time goes on, Ricky’s disassociation only grows, becoming positively heartbreaking when we realize he has no means to eat or drink, and each time he attempts to use the subway rest rooms they are chain locked at night, leaving him in a perilous predicament where he’s forced to urinate on himself, one of the few times fellow passengers actually acknowledge his existence, as they further taunt and humiliate him.  While you’d think a train employee would notice him, as the smell alone ought to attract attention, but he is surprisingly never rescued by anyone and instead completely ignored.  He is able to find an unused, half-empty water bottle, and even some small change enough to purchase a bag of potato chips, but after more than a week his state of mind deteriorates and he grows delusional from hunger and thirst, where he begins hallucinating, seeing fellow passengers turn into monsters, where reality shifts into another dimension with sights and sounds routinely altered.  This mental dilemma forces him to fear almost everyone, often seen scurrying away from perceived signs of trouble.     

The only distraction from Ricky’s harrowing journey is a strange fascination with odd shapes and designs, where he can be seen staring at mysterious patterns on the subway walls.  While Ricky’s dilemma is a purely subjective experience, so is that of his family, as his mother searches endlessly for him in all the nearby locations, gaining help from a shoe store saleswoman, Carmen (Marsha Stephanie Blake), where Ricky likes to spend time in the store staring at the different color designs of the shoes.  She helps put up signs with Ricky’s picture on it in the neighborhood and encourages the family to make a police report, despite their undocumented status, but the police are little help, continually finding missing kids that bear no resemblance to Ricky.  By the time Ricardo Sr. shows up, Mariana already thinks the worst, that Ricky may never return home alive.  Their search through the neighborhood is another impressionistic montage of wordless images, while Mariana also reports that he’s missing to his school, where she receives a lecture about how underfunded the school is to help special needs children, suggesting there are schools with specially trained staff that would be a better fit, which is an infuriorating insult under normal circumstances, but emphasizes the indifference Ricky faces, where even his school has little interest in helping him, and now he’s lost and utterly on his own.  Adding to the growing dilemma are reports that Hurricane Sandy is fast approaching, with amazing footage of a ferocious ocean with gigantic waves crashing onto the beach, where an ominous announcement is made over a loudspeaker that no trains will be running after 7 pm due to the anticipated flooding of the subway tunnels.  Once more finding himself abandoned and alone, he sees the fleeting image of the man with the dragon symbol on his jacket, following him to the edge of the platform and into the darkness of the tunnel, even as the audience hears disturbing sounds of onrushing water.  The next day, naturalistic shots of the storm’s aftermath are devastating, like the remnants of a tornado, leaving a path of washed up destruction in its wake.  The actual storm appeared during the final days of shooting, where the dramatic footage adds an apocalyptic edge of doom to the finale, where so much was lost in the destruction, where Ricky’s world comes to resemble the shadowy eye of the storm, a murky existence where real and unreal merge, an oasis of perceived calmness surrounded by indescribable wreckage. 

Blue Ruin

BLUE RUIN                B                     

USA  (92 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Jeremy Saulnier

Jeremy Saulnier was the superb cinematographer in Matthew Porterfield’s experimental films HAMILTON (2006) and Putty Hill (2010), while making his first feature MURDER PARTY (2007, which could easily be the title of this film as well), a kind of comic Halloween bloodbath, while still holding onto a career in advertising, creating product videos for Kraft Foods, IBM, Viacom, and the NHL.  This second film was the winner of the Director’s Fortnight FIPRESCI Award at Cannes 2013, a marked upgrade in critical acclaim, an ultra stylish revenge thriller made on the cheap, featuring the director’s childhood best friend as the lead actor and executive producer, Macon Blair as Dwight, a homeless man living in his rusted out blue Pontiac on the beach, where the opening sequence replicates Morris Engel’s often overlooked American indie film Little Fugitive (1953), where Dwight similarly hides out under protective cover at the local amusement park, also picking up disposable bottles left laying about and returning them to recycling centers for cash, where immediately we get the feel this is an eccentric and possibly creepy guy living on the fringes.  The cops pick him up not for anything he’s done, but to warn him that the convicted dual murderer of his mother and father is being released from jail soon, which sets a series of events in motion, such as an ominous visit to the local gun shop.  Saulnier does a good job playing with the audience’s expectations, always throwing them a bit off kilter, using plenty of odd humor throughout.  What this really comes down to is watching a geeky loner who has spent his life avoiding people, who barely talks to anyone, suddenly going after the Cleland family, savagely gruesome, grindhouse B-movie characters in the mold of Rob Zombie’s THE DEVIL’S REJECTS (2005), a film that took sadistic trailer trash and elevated it to an art form. 

The audience knows Dwight is in over his head, and every conceivable plan he comes up with goes haywire, but Saulnier amps up the suspense throughout, knowing full well that the audience can’t take their eyes off this foolhardy attempt to exact revenge for his family.  Why he feels the need to pull this off, we’ll never know, as this writer/director confidently leaves out plenty of back story, luring us right into the middle of the action, which at times is fast and fierce, while at other times there’s a lull between the storms, where like a cat, Dwight disappears and licks his wounds.  Acting against type, Dwight surprises us with is ingenuity, though it’s sheer damn luck that seems to get him out of situations, certainly not forethought, as most of the time he responds to pure kneejerk reactions, such as the moment of truth when he springs upon his prey like a man possessed, an unflinching moment of violence reminiscent of a similar moment in Jacques Audiard’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet ....  Once he crosses the line, there’s no turning back, as neither he nor the audience have a clue what’s in store for him.  The things that catch his eye are often weirdly amusing, or just plain odd, but he has the good sense to rely upon the help of others, starting out with his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves), who nearly busts his chops for reviving this blood feud, as she’s now with two children and a home, making her a convenient target.  From that point on, the film seems to take on a life of its own, as it’s Jamie Lee Curtis preparing to meet the bogeyman in HALLOWEEN (1978).  

Tracking down another friend is inspired by a scan through Dwight’s high school yearbook, where Devin Ratray as local war veteran Ben is the best thing in the picture, as he steals every scene he’s in.  Ben isn’t sure what to make of Dwight’s situation at all, and since he’s the one usually perceived as having a screw loose, Dwight must be in sick trouble, but he tries his best to help him out, only sensing what deep shit he must be in.  But Dwight, being who he is, continues to fuck up, but he’s a lovable loser who’s forced to turn into some kind of super sleuth and RAMBO-like warrior on the loose.  Vigilante justice is a genre unto itself, and this director seems to enjoy changing the rules of the game, shifting genres, and putting his lead character into ever more increasing danger, adding dark noirish elements throughout, anything to heighten the atmospheric mood.  The film is fraught with tension, but takes a predictable turn by the end, where the story simply runs out of options, though seeing Eve Plumb from The Brady Bunch (1969-74) as the redneck mama urging her boys to kill this son-of-a-bitch has a charm all its own.  It gets a little dicey, where family secrets are finally revealed, but this plays out like mafia families who vow revenge, refusing to back down under any circumstances, as if it’s a matter of honor.  Well, there’s little honor to speak of, and the moral grounds crossed by all participants keeps the audience guessing what will happen next.  It’s a taut thriller, dark and highly entertaining, continually atmospheric, well written and well directed, with a refreshing take on familiar themes.      

Kid-Thing

KID-THING          B               

USA  (83 mi)  2012  d:  David Zellner  

David and Nathan Zellner may be the modern era’s answer to the Kuchar brothers, schlock kings of 60’s and 70’s underground films made for next to nothing, where they similarly began making basement movies in their own backyard as kids, where David went on to film school at the University of Texas in Austin before making films that exist “on the fringes of the indie world,” developing a kind of dark, absurdist humor, offbeat murder mysteries featuring wacky characters with weird accents, and a somewhat outsider’s view towards art.  Quoting from a John Rosenblatt article from The Texas Observer, The Zellner Brothers Embrace Awkwardness | The Texas Observer:

They got their first film, Flotsam/Jetsam, into Sundance in 2005 after several years of rejection, but that success sparked a remarkable run. There was the absurdist Southern Gothic Redemptitude in 2006, then 2007’s Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, in which the brothers scream at each other on a country road while dressed as mariachis. Then came their first Sundance feature-length film, Goliath, in 2008, about a man who slowly unravels when his cat disappears. The short triptych Fiddlestixx followed in 2010, a sort of Technicolor Atari tribute to Samuel Beckett and Japanese variety shows starring a gibbon in a diaper. Then, in 2011, Sasquatch Birth Journal 2, which is, ostensibly, the quite literal video birth journal of a sasquatch.

This latest feature is something of a concept film, like something we might expect from the mischievous mind of British novelist Roald Dahl, a unique portrait of loneliness and a curious exploration into the twisted mind of an unsettled child who is largely raising herself.  With no backstory, no mother to speak of, and a father Marvin (Nathan Zellner, the director’s brother, who is also the cinematographer, producer, and sound designer) who is continually asleep, passed out from drinking, or preoccupied with his own affairs, 10-year old Annie (Sydney Aguirre) is free to roam the countryside at will as there is literally no one watching over her, where even when she’s at home she’s alone, so she spends every waking hour being bored, pissed off, strangely curious, mad at others, or acting as a tomboy, viewed as a troubled and rebellious child who acts inappropriately.  While she is in nearly every shot of the film, not once do we ever see this child smile. 

Seen through a child’s eyes, the naturalness of her isolated world recalls the near documentary realism of Morris Engel’s Little Fugitive (1953), which is largely a wordless odyssey of a 12-year old boy’s experience alone at a Coney Island amusement park, but here there is a seamless blend of the internal and external worlds, where much of what’s happening may all be in her imagination, where at her age it’s hard to tell the difference.  The interest of this film is in the minutiae, as it’s a minimalist style where nothing much ever happens, but what we do see is tinged by an everpresent sadness enveloping her world.  When she attempts to play with other kids at a local playground, she is rejected and taunted as an outsider, which only leaves her more alone.  Told in long, lingering takes, she rides her BMX dirt bike through town, often stealing supplies at the local market before wandering down the dirt roads outside of town through the surrounding woods, where she amuses herself by throwing objects at cars moving down the highway, where drivers are baffled to discover it’s only rolled up biscuit dough, or she shoots things with BB guns or paint guns, or rips apart dead tree bark, nonchalantly destroying anything she stumbles across.  But strangest of all is when she overhears a distant voice calling for help, a sound that reverberates with sound effects giving it a mysterious air about it, sounds that only grow louder when she approaches what turns out to be a dark hole in the ground with a person trapped below.  Not knowing how to react, she runs away, afraid and thoroughly confused by what she experienced. 

Back home, her father is usually embroiled in some less than fascinating discussion with his best friend Caleb (director David Zellner) over a few beers, where to the uninformed much of what you hear is completely unintelligible, but in one drunken argument, Marvin is seen chasing after Caleb with firecracker rockets as Caleb makes a hasty escape in his car, still fending off fired rockets.  Needless to say, her father’s parental skills leave something to be desired, where he’s not the kind of comforting adult figure children would turn to, but is approached only as a last resort.  Instead, she fends for herself, where you have to see it to believe it the way she makes sandwiches in her own unique way, and after stealing a few supplies, she returns to the hole in the ground, this time introducing herself, bringing supplies, and asking who’s down there, wondering if it’s Satan.  When asked if she’ll bring help, Annie’s snappy reply is “Why should I?”  The voice in the well belongs to Esther, Susan Tyrell, a fixture in the movie business since the early 70’s, appearing in John Huston’s FAT CITY (1972), but Annie can’t tell if she’s good or evil, running away again, not resolving anything, despite the pleading cries for help.  In Annie’s world it’s hard to tell how much time passes, as it’s all strung together like the endless duration of summer vacation which seemingly has no beginning and no end in sight.  Annie brings a walkie talkie and drops it down the hole (where it makes no sound), but then disappears as quickly as she arrives, not really knowing what to make of this lady down the hole, thinking maybe she’s down there for a reason.  While there are occasional middle of the night conversations, none are very pleasant, as Esther is losing her patience with this little girl, and no one else has come by to help, so her voice only grows more desperate.  The growing sense of ambiguity about what’s actually going on is a remarkable aspect of the film, as is the unpredictability factor of not knowing how such a volatile child will react, becoming darkly surreal by the end.  As it turns out, both the child and the lady in the well are kindred spirits, two isolated souls dead set on escaping the horror and ugliness of their situation.  While Annie’s neglect has perhaps heightened her understanding of loneliness, she’s still caught in the throes of her own inescapable logic and imagination.  

Little Fugitive (1953)

LITTLE FUGITIVE                 B+                  

USA  (75 mi)  1953  d:  Morris Engel   co-directors:  Ray Ashley and Ruth Orkin

This is a small and often overlooked film that tends to fall through the cracks, rarely part of the discussion of Orson Welles in the 50’s or John Cassavetes in the 60’s when one recalls the history of American independent or low-budget films, where the film is listed here:  AMERICAN INDEPENDENT FILM - Movie List on mubi.com, but not here:  American independent films.  Made for just $30,000 during the heyday of the studio system, the film is barely mentioned next to the influential, independently financed films made outside the studio system, such as Welles’s OTHELLO (1952) or MR. ARKADIN (1955), or experimental short films made prior to that.  LITTLE FUGITIVE (1953) was the first independent feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, in this case Best Original Screenplay, while also winning a Silver Lion Award at Venice.  Shot using a cinéma-vérité style, this American film predates most of Jean Rouch’s documentaries, one of the founding fathers of the style, and is often cited as having an influence on François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), one of the seminal works of the French New Wave, while also having an impact on the Iranian New Wave films from the 70’s to 90’s that often sought to tell religious or metaphorical stories through a child’s eyes.  Storywise, the film is something of a cross between The Cat in the Hat, a mischievous children’s book by Dr. Seuss that suggests pure anarchy exists while Mom’s away, and the Chaplin Silent era where the Little Tramp lives on the fringes of society, usually a victim of circumstances, often observing the exploits of people of privilege from the vantage point of a hungry Tramp having nothing at all.  After Mom goes away for a 24-hour period due to an emergency medical situation in the family, she leaves behind two mischievous brothers who are instructed to stay home, 12-year old older brother Lennie (Richard Brewster) and 7-year old younger brother Joey (Richie Andrusco), leaving a few dollars on the table for food.  But these boisterous kids are seen earlier continually hanging out on the cramped streets of Brooklyn, New York with other boys, exploring the vacant lots nearby, shooting guns at targets, and even playing baseball in the streets, perpetually hanging outside, only coming indoors when they’re hungry, so the idea of staying home all day seems beyond their capabilities. 

 

As the youngest, the older boys continually pester and pick on Joey, usually trying to get rid of him, as they really don’t like him tagging along, a spoiled and often whiny, freckle-faced kid with dirt and slime constantly on his face with an everpresent toy gun in his holster, so they design a cruel hoax where it appears Joey has shot his older brother, using ketchup like they do in the movies.  Believing the worst, suddenly wracked with guilt and afraid of all policemen, Joey is encouraged to high-tail it out of town “until the heat dies down,” suddenly feeling all alone in the world.  Grabbing the money his mother left on the table, he hops on the subway, getting off at the end of the line, which happens to be Coney Island, wandering around alone, where the rest of the film is a somewhat mystifying, mostly wordless odyssey through an amusement park as seen through a child’s eyes, initially dejected, lost and alone, but eventually discovering the delights of the crowds, the funhouses, the merry-go-round, ball-throwing and shooting galleries, batting cages, cowboy photographs, pony rides, not to mention all the food vendors, where Joey can be seen eating to his heart’s content.  Shot in Black and White, a minimalist film told in a naturalistic manner, the overall key to the film is using a portable, hand-built 35mm camera by Charlie Woodruff that could be strapped to the shoulders, designed by the cinematographer and co-director Morris Engel who refused to use a tripod, insisting upon the mobility of constant street movement, a remarkably effective technique that caught the eye of young American director Stanley Kubrick who wished to rent the camera and Jean-Luc Godard who wished to purchase it.  Engel was able to hold a remarkably steady camera image long before the development of the Steadycam.  Of interest, much like Italian Neo-Realism, the film was shot without dialogue, so every word of dialogue had to be re-synched back in the studio afterwards, where the earliest sequences suffer the most, resorting to predictably generic dialogue, while Engel’s wife Ruth Orkin co-edits the film, a first time experience for both of them, teaming up with a friend, Ray Ashley, to co-write, co-direct, and co-produce the film.     

Joey eventually discovers the crowds at the beach, learning he can return disposable pop bottles for a cash refund, where he interweaves throughout the human throngs grabbing discarded bottles, receiving a nickel for each returned bottle, where the stark and somewhat downbeat realism of his existential wanderings often contrast with a few whimsical moments when he plays with even smaller kids.  Joey’s real passion is the pony rides, which he returns to again and again, developing a friendly relationship with Jay Williams, the Pony Man, who eventually suspects something is up with a kid wandering around without any adult supervision, which only scares the poor kid off, where one of the most hauntingly beautiful scenes is the transition into nightfall Little Fugitive: Nightfall scene - YouTube (1:38), where the musical soundtrack throughout is Lester Troob’s lone harmonica, using “Home On the Range” as the movie’s musical theme.  In the morning, Joey dusts himself off after spending a night outdoors and washes his face in the public fountain, copied identically by Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups).  In the early hours when the beach is empty and there are no crowds, the Pony Man again befriends Joey, letting him help with the horses, trying to alleviate his suspicions, but also acquiring information where he obtains an address or phone number, getting ahold of Lennie who makes a beeline to the Pony Man at Coney Island, but Joey has again disappeared, where the camera follows Lennie in his search for his younger brother, oddly similar, but due to the age difference, less compelling, as Joey is the real star of the show, giving a heartbreaking performance that can’t be matched by anyone else, literally owning the audience’s sympathies.  Veering back and forth between sidewalk shots and aerial views, giving a time capsule glimpse of Coney Island, there’s a gorgeously photographed rainstorm where people rush for cover, where the beaches empty and crowds hover under the bleachers waiting the rain out, reminiscent of an era when people had time to wait, where they weren’t rushing to get somewhere, but could simply wait out a storm.  Afterwards, Joey is once again alone on the vast emptiness of the beach, engulfed by the enormity of it all, just a speck in the sand until his brother spots him, where of course no one makes any mention of an adventure when Mom returns home.  The film was inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1997.