Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)

[manicsounds]

The US release has no extras, so it makes it unattractive for me to import and buy something sight unseen as well. Is there any chance that non-US versions might have some extras on it or not?

[domino harvey]

Carruth has said he doesn't want any bonus materials on the release (and he's the one who put the American set out, remember), so if you want it, it's not gonna look much different than this anywhere else

[swo17]

I live in the states and still had to buy it to see it on Blu-ray (rental services only have it on DVD). I don't regret my purchase.

[John Cope]

Still haven't seen the film yet but thought this piece was pretty interesting.

And, intriguingly, from the article linked within the text (from 2012):

Maybe, I think with mounting conviction, the real me would have displayed better self-control, had I not been forced to swim upstream against the will of an insidious parasite.

[JamesF]

The US release has no extras, so it makes it unattractive for me to import and buy something sight unseen as well. Is there any chance that non-US versions might have some extras on it or not?

I'm going to hold out until Metrodome's UK release later in the year just in case for this very reason. They haven't even set a date for theatrical yet AFAIK so could take a while. Anyway, can't wait to see this on a big screen - watched it on a laptop for work a couple of months ago and as a longtime fan of Primer was utterly blown away.

Very keen to re-read A Topiary now too, though I think I'll have to try and annotate it as I go - it's by far the densest script I've ever read, but ultimately very rewarding. Hopefully Carruth gets his shot to make it at some point, even if it's at the expense of the 1980s-set opening section.

[Harbinger]

I was not blown away by it. On a sonic-visual level, it was a pleasure. As a narrative there was no gratification, but it doesn't demand this. Saying this, it had my full attention until the very end. There is an idea at play, a recurrent theme, composition, and links etc. but no matter how you try to tie them up, it doesn't feel rewarding once it's over. Today, however, I feel different about it. After digesting it, little things are surfacing and niggling. I can't wait to watch it again and see if it justifies my thoughts on it, even if I bust a gut doing so.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

Favorite film of the year so far. One could say that Carruth borrowed too heavily from Malick's visual sensibility, but given the themes--loss of material security, the confusion of personal identity, and the ultimate refuge within a bright open-spaced wounded natural world--the choice to borrow from Malick makes perfect sense. I'm thinking, for example, of the shallow focus when Jeff is being followed by two indistinct men before dumping files into a corporate stairwell; it's a simple thing, but of course the character's connection to a normative life is being rapidly dissolved and through his financial trouble, other people (aside from Kris) are becoming forbidding refusals, threatening ciphers. It really captures that alienation one experiences when jobs are lost, savings spent, friends disappear. And the piecemeal, fragmented cutting serves the frustrating, uncanny experience of Kris and Jeff's blended memory. The pseudo-science, of course, amounts to a snake eating its tail (although, with reference to warren and ferdinand's argument, this shouldn't preclude taking it seriously as potent symbolism, nor is it a futile, nerdy exercise to trace causality), but it involves such gorgeous, close-up imagery--blue orchids, pigs' eyelashes, decomposition, grommets, nematodes, paper garlands--it nonetheless combines to shore up neatly the circular, cyclical nature of the film's many themes. Beautiful work with sound in this film, too; I have a friend who gathers sound recordings not unlike the Sampler, and the film really captures the obsessiveness of this preoccupation. This would be a great triple feature with Todd Haynes' Safe and Hubert Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare, as three examples of the way in which altered nature inevitably affects human perception.

[colinr0380]

A fascinating film but an extremely abstract one. It is a little like a mirror image of Primer in the sense that where Primer is full of constant, fast paced chatter, Upstream Color is losing language completely, fading it into the background or making it unintelligible. Yet both films contain that idea of someone confronting a lost and detached, almost alien and unrecognisable, part of themselves - in this case in the form of a personalised pig companion/doppleganger/surrogate child!

I also really liked the way that with the almost total absence of motivational dialogue in the latter stages, the film almost becomes an exercise in storytelling through complex intercutting editing patterns (which like Primer could be happening simultaneously, in the past or in the future in relation to the scenes that they are being intercut with), and in a strange way ends up feeling more connected to modern dance in the way that the movements and interrelationship of the actors on screen ends up telling the story and providing the emotional catharsis of the film.

I like the wider ideas mentioned in the thread about it being about the financial crisis and so on, and I think the film is open enough to support that. However, and this may just be because I have recently just been re-watching the excellent film Waco: The Rules of Engagement for the documentary project, but on watching Upstream Color I got the impression that I was watching a film about what being in a cult does to (and more importantly feels like subjectively) an individual. The main character is plucked without warning from their normal life, ritually violated and left both physically and psychologically scarred by their experiences, along with having been brainwashed into giving all of their worldly goods away to their abuser and is given an incredibly strong connection to a single piece of literature as a part of their 'programming', a connection that still remains potent long after the purpose it was being used for (part of a series of busy work tasks which steadily increase in number and complexity in order to keep minds occupied while they were being fleeced of their worldly possessions) is long past.

Then they are suddenly abandoned and left without purpose and without a sense of how to cope with the world that suddenly seems so strange and alien after their experiences at the hands of their abuser have wiped away all connections with their previous life. Is that person they were before they were inducted into the cult gone forever? Totally destroyed by their experiences, turning them into a totally new person? In the face of that extreme disconnect, the characters only have the tools left behind from their abusive experience to try and rebuild themselves with, even if that is going to be problematic. So the Walden book becomes a shared symbol between those who have shared the same ritual abuse, and also the key for those trying to break down barriers with the abused person to be able to make a form of contact with them.

The film comes to a point in its final scenes where it feels that the characters are reconciling their new lives and acknowledging their horrific trauma as something that is part of themselves. The initial shock and disorientation of adapting back to the outside world is not so raw as it first was, and the characters even get to a point at the end (with the pig farm) where they are able to form a community and in a way, and albeit imperfectly, 'reclaim' what they were before they were violated.

In that sense I agree with gcgiles that Safe is a good companion piece to this film, although the ending to Upstream Color does not feel quite as darkly ambivalent (compared to Safe's sense of blissfully and problematically retreating from the outside world) about the future of its main character as Safe did.

[Luke M]

My emotions to this went from repulsed to awe to disappointment to finally, awe again. I was repulsed by the early hypnosis scenes, it felt like watching an extended rape scene albeit without actual intercourse. But as the movie moved onto the pig farmer and then the woman with the man, I became entrenched in the story. I loved the abstractness of it. The cinematography reminded me of pre-Pineapple Express David Gordon Green. Initially, I was disappointed in the ending. I felt like for a movie that had challenged me so much during most of it's running time had very conveniently wrapped everything up in a bow. I slept on it and the next day I couldn't get the film out of my head. I think it's one of the years best.

[colinr0380]

It definitely is: watching it again I think I underestimated the idea of love meaning the commitment to your partner's needs and attempts to share or get on the wavelength of their experiences. I'm not sure if the reading of the film in some reviews as being about Shane Carruth's character also having been "sampled" is a correct one, as I think that the film works better as someone who is in love with a person who has been through a traumatic experience learning to communicate with them by learning to exist on their wavelength (including taking on some of their neuroses) to become a part of their world. Something which resonates with those early scenes between the pair where Jeff's attempted wooing keeps hitting false notes that make him sound like the abuser from the first section of the film casually steering Kris around, or his job being to illegally siphon money from corporate accounts, and his annoyance when Kris co-opts his childhood memories because hers have been wiped out by the procedure.

Despite the presence of the pair of pigs that get equated with our human characters I think Jeff hasn't been through the sampling himself, yet is able to facilitate Kris's confrontation with the Sampler (in a great shot where downcast deferent eyes turn to look directly at him with newfound defiance) and reclaiming of her own past, and help in her project of setting up of a kind of survivors commune. After all that is what love, marriage and commitment is about!

There is also that interesting theme of the life cycle running through the film, from the multiple stage and seemingly cyclical and endless progression of the plant to the maggot into a person through them into the pig and then from the corpse of the pig into the roots of the plant (repeated events to match those in Primer), to the process of being sampled leading to massive trauma and infertility. Brutally inflicted death (physical or of the self) as a necessary part of continuing the lives of others. What makes that setting up of the commune such a happy ending is that by not killing the pigs the cycle is broken: the trees will not produce blue flowers and maggots that can be harvested. So while those that have been sampled have their commune and past-selves-holding pig surrogates as compensation, at least the process of infecting new people appears to have been brought to an end.

[Shrew]

I think it's clear the Jeff character has been sampled. Besides the pig couple, he talks briefly about how his first marriage ended when he "went crazy" and stole some money or some other illegal thing, which sounds very similar to what Kris went through. It's suggested that he only has his current "sketchy" job because of some friends who willing to overlook his past, but he still isn't allowed on the official company records because of that.

However, you're not wrong when you say the relationship is about helping each other cope and grow! I just think that it's a mutual thing, born out of both characters going through a similar traumatic experience. Both have developed different ways of dealing with the fallout, and the film is optimistic that the two complement each other and adapt to each other. What makes the film work so well is the way this central relationship can be read on many levels--as two people helping each other get over a science-fiction infestation, recover from an economic crash, deal with their relationship to a cruel, distant god, work through shared trauma, or just a general exploration of how any two people in a relationship have to deal with each others' past, build connections, tolerate neuroses, and bleed into each others personalities a bit.

That all this works both on intellectual and emotional levels is why I like this film so much.

[rohming]

Jeff was definitely sampled. I don't think the film left that ambiguous. That's why he's part of the psychic pig connection (so weird to say, but I love it) and, heck, they even show the marks from the worm removal on him at some point.

[mfunk9786]

I'll let Matt Singer say it for me, because he touches on pretty much every issue I have

EDIT: Dead link, updated to Wayback Machine archive of it

[JamesF]

Just to touch back on a point raised earlier - the UK Blu-Ray was released last Monday by Metrodome and contains no extras other than the trailer.