"But you're gonna keep playing?"
"Well, that's really all I got going for me, you know. That's the only thing that sets me apart from being just another drunk."
I've just had a really weird experience with this film, so apologies if the tone of this post feels a little up and down on the film! This is a kind of mix of three or four different posts, written and re-written at different points and with different intensities of, positive and negative, feelings towards the film! It has taken me most of the week to write, and re-write it, and it would have been a radically different post if I did so after the first viewing (in which I didn't like the film at all!) to after a couple more re-watches (I had to force myself over the weekend to come back and assess it fairly) when I started to find things that made the film grow on me a lot. I think that this film really improves with constant reviewing. But, boy, does the film make a tough to like first impression! (As the best character in the film, the Shakespearean chorus figure of the punk rock girl being interviewed about the music scene, says near the beginning of the film: "They sounded really rough, but in those days you gave a band a chance. These days all they want is professionalism. They'll boo you off stage if you aren't slick enough.")
I mostly agreed with Shrew at first on this, but am starting to see it more from zedz's perspective now! It's a...frustrating film, but feels kind of intentionally so. There are occasions where there are some nice shots (the grainy aesthetic here works very well, and that circling pan from the streets of Mexico to the sea is really nice) and techniques which felt as if they could be interesting, but I kept feeling as if I were being thrown out of the film again and again by almost everything about it. You know in that thread for Man of Violence released by the BFI where I described it as an improv gangster film with lots of 'cool' actions being shown but with little idea of why they were cool in the first place, and an unsympathetic bunch of characters? This has some of that same feel at first. There is even an empty gesture, abandoning of a vehicle scene! But there are also moments like having a rotary telephone, complete with pre-mobile phone cord next to your swiming pool 'just because'! Or seeing the picture of Dean sitting on his truck at the drive-in framed on Jeff's wall in the scene
before he actually arrives at the drive in! But is that a pure production mistake or a way of alluding to the way that the eventually the central drama of the film turns out to have been solved even before it began? These strange bits of business can eventually feel like a kind of comment on the aimlessness, and fecklessness, of the main characters. Or maybe I'm reading far, far too much into a very rough and ready, punkish film!
I also had the same 'Masculin Feminin' thoughts as Shrew about those interview segments in which we hear the directors questioning different characters about their actions, one of whom we do not 'officially' meet in the film itself. It was strange at first but I really liked these moments (especially that they also feature Godardian-seeming jump cuts within the interview - stylistically intentional or just accidental? At this level of filmmaking both are valid!). I wasn't sure that they had a function in the film on the first viewing, but now they seem to be providing the context, introspection and irony (especially in the epilogue) that the characters in the film itself are not experiencing, or are actively trying not to reveal! It is a strange technique because
why exactly would anyone be interviewing these characters about such a minor event in such a brief period of their lives? (At least Godard in Masculin Feminin set up Jean-Pierre Leaud as a poll researcher and
that girl being aggressively interviewed as the winner of a magazine competition to suggest a reason) But that strange stylistic choice itself started to inspire some sympathy in me, especially at the end. These characters get to talk to someone about their lives, someone who is interested in them and the changes that they have been through. I was left thinking of all the people who go through minor trials every day and have no one to witness their development. They're the same but their lives have moved on a little and they have a different perspective and different things they have decided to get out of their lives. (Of course these days in the social media age, people won't shut up about every little thing they do in their lives! Me included! So we've moved from the small but important events in people's lives going unnoticed to them being impossible to pick out from all the other stuff about what someone had for dinner this evening, and so on!)
The main thing I learnt from the film though was that punks seem to make for terrible babysitters and don't leave them around cats. (Never let them work with children or animals!)
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In the early scenes I really liked the gambling ship discussion that cuts to a scene of Jeff's wife and daughter (Luanna and Devon) and Chris on a paddle boat on a lake, and then the cut from that to Chris's own to-camera interview scene reminiscing about Jeff. That worked really well, along with the belligerent badgering of Luanna in her interview that follows!
The film's first half is a kind of lazily vague semi-mystery until the explanation for why Jeff had goons after him and had fled to Mexico was revealed (I sort of had that recent mumblecore 'mystery' film
Cold Weather come to mind whilst watching). The opening of flushing some pills (drugs? It turns out to be quaaludes that were also in the safe) away in the toilet which opens the film does work as a sketching in of some kind of motivation for Jeff fleeing. There is also the suggestion that Jeff perhaps just needs inspiration after running into trouble on his latest album, so has disappeared for that. The 'actual reasons' for Jeff and his friends being in trouble which get revealed over halfway through the film (a nightclub raid after not being paid for a gig) are far, far less interesting and also kind of concretises the characters from just
seeming like self obsessed idiots to actually
being so! Jeff is already kind of terrible for leaving his wife and child behind as he runs from trouble (the child being thrown into the mix makes everything worse!), and while Luanna is a great character to follow for the majority of the film, even she starts to seem tainted by associating with these idiots! Or at least not that great a judge of character! This
really runs the risk of throwing the audience out of the film at that point, asking why the hell they are watching this bunch of characters ruining each others lives (or at least that was my reaction on first watching the film!)
Yet perhaps that is the point, only emphasised when the one vaguely responsible character in Luanna sells her car to pay back the nightclub manager/record producer only to be told that Jeff sorted it out from Mexico days before! Its an anti-dramatic film in that sense, where any tension is manufactured and immediately negated. It is a film less about the crime or the disappearance (or damningly even the relationships) but sort of about a band tearing itself apart, even when they're not in the recording studio!
Even the film itself at the end seems to have some fun toying with both sets of terrible characters, as Luanna treks to the Mexican trailer that Jeff has been using, while Jeff at the same time travels back to San Diego. They've crossed paths and missed each other on their cross country journeys, with Luanna impotently shouting at her travel companions as Jeff back at home rants at the (brilliantly flaky) babysitter about how he 'risked his life' in coming back (he obviously didn't as he sorted the situation out, but seems to have been planning to play this up to Luann and the other guys) and gets annoyed that Chris has muscled in on his life and marriage (but then Jeff himself has shown little to no interest in them)!
What really saves the film at the very last moment is that "2 or 6 months later" epilogue. The camera is more static and we get a whole series of those interviews with the characters about where they are now and what they are doing with their lives. The interview with Luanna sort of provides the climax of the film, in which she talks about this experience having caused her to realise that she was mothering the guys (who really are overgrown children throughout) whilst leaving Devon parentless. This then cuts to a shot of Devon glumly sat on a "musical ferris wheel" seat (going from one extreme to another of suddenly having too much attention from mom!) that is revolving around which seems to be a pointed call back to Chris driving his car in circles in his suburban cul-de-sac from much earlier on.
This is then followed by the interview with the very first 'Shakespearean chorus' punk girl from the beginning, talking abstractly about the punk scene but really encapsulating the ideas the filmmakers seem to have been going for with the characters in the film itself (I'll quote most of it but leave the amusing final line to discover for yourselves!):
"It was like the music was still good...but we were left just sitting around. It was like all the mystery that was there in the beginning was gone. It just wasn't the same. I guess it was my fault...I must have just expected too much, invested too much in the musicians. You can't expect other people to create drama for your life. They're too busy creating it for themselves. They're just people, I guess."
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This edition is also hugely benefited by the extras: the commentaries are fantastic and great fun (the cast track even has a brief moment of someone wondering why anyone would pay money for the film before quickly being shushed, so they kind of knew this film was a hard sell!) and it shows that no matter how bad people consider the film to be in its final state there was a time where it could have been worse with Chris, the almost stalkerish bandmate muscling in on the troubled marriage between Luanna and Jeff, apparently adding in some extra drama to the final scenes by murdering Luanna! Instead this is toned down in the final film to just being a little too over friendly!
The deleted scenes are also valuable additions. They all feel rightly dropped yet interesting. There is the scene of Luanna actually going to Mexico, meeting Jeff and spending the night with him before they have an argument about him coming back, leading to Luanna leaving him there. In the final film she returns home with her car having broken down halfway to Mexico, so it sort of emphasises the distance between the couple more and creates a sense of drama and isolation than the couple meeting early on did! It also makes the final failed trip to the Mexican trailer more significant too!
Most of the rest of the deleted scenes are alternate takes that take place in different locations and really all of the takes in the final film work better. For example Luanna talks to your generic grumpy record producer mogul about the nightclub robbery rather than to the slightly bored assistant as in the final film, which is both novel and funnier! And the meeting between Luanna and Dave which takes place on the stairs of the club in the film takes place in a bathroom in the alternate scene. The interaction flows much more naturally on the stairs, only emphasised by the incredibly awkward Wim Wenders cameo that occurs at the end of the bathroom version of the scene!
And the Flesheaters music video on the disc for
The Wedding Dice is a really great addition, even including a brief appearance by Mary Woronov in a white coat! (It made me think of The Crow whilst watching it!)
