Thursday, May 15, 2008
First-time director Mark Hanlon may have watched "Eraserhead" too many times, but he sure knows how to sustain a mood.
Mar 28, 2000 | It seems gratuitously cruel to trash an ambitious independent film that has little chance of reaching a large audience, even if it is kind of an incomprehensible mess. So let's at least credit "Buddy Boy," the first feature from writer/director Mark Hanlon, for the courage and daring that are clearly its finest accomplishments. It wants to be about love, madness and the nature of religious faith, yet it also has more practical questions in mind: Can vegans be cannibals? How many times can a guy break into his girlfriend's apartment brandishing a weapon before she will have had enough? If the result of all this is a mannered, pretentious mishmash, in which several talented actors are abandoned to wander around frothing at the mouth, it's just interesting enough to suggest that Hanlon has a far better movie in him somewhere down the line.
"Buddy Boy" is the story of a stuttering, tormented geek who rarely leaves his stepmother's apartment -- at least I think it is -- and it creates and sustains its own distinctive mood, larded with flashes of black humor. That mood is a lot closer to the dream state, or perhaps schizophrenia, than to the supposedly edgy, this-is-how-it-is naturalism favored by almost all first-time filmmakers these days. My guess would be that Hanlon has watched David Lynch's "Eraserhead" way too many times -- return that video to the library, young man! But it's nonetheless refreshing to encounter a young filmmaker whose taste runs to more esoteric fare than "Reservoir Dogs," "Blood Simple" and "North by Northwest."
There are no snarky discussions of pop-culture topics or Eastern philosophy in "Buddy Boy," no mislaid suitcases of gold bullion or murder plots gone wrong, no sense that the filmmaker is perched on a cloud hoarding his cardboard thunderbolts and smirking at his inferior creatures. In fact, there may be no world at all outside the troubled mind of Francis (Aidan Gillen), a photo developer who lives in a tenement apartment somewhere in a nameless and apparently timeless American city. (While the clothing looks contemporary, Francis' lair features no TV remote or touch-tone telephone.) After he gets home from work, Francis fixes dinner for his drunken, moronic stepmom (Susan Tyrrell) -- sometimes it's a canned meat product called SMEAT and sometimes it's cat food -- and, if he's lucky, jerks off while watching a beautiful woman (Emmanuelle Seigner) undressing in an opposite apartment.
Numerous films have of course been constructed around the idea of voyeurism -- chief among them Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" -- and by now it's Film Criticism 101 to claim that spying on someone is some kind of metaphor for the act of watching a movie. Even if Hanlon is mining this dubious psychological territory one more time, it isn't his main concern. "Buddy Boy" owes its allegiance to a far more obscure, even symbolist school of cinema, one that's drastically out of fashion at the moment. Besides early Lynch, Hanlon has an obvious affinity for the Roman Polanski of "Repulsion," the Nicolas Roeg of "Don't Look Now" and maybe the Martin Scorsese of "Taxi Driver" (but not "Mean Streets"). In other words, if you're one of those viewers who like to have an hourlong, double-cappuccino-fueled discussion right after the movie, you've found a kindred spirit.
To me, the films on that list -- even the supposedly immortal "Taxi Driver" -- look increasingly like relics of the art-damaged '70s, receding in the rearview mirror. But they're brave choices all the same, and their spectral presence hovering over "Buddy Boy" makes it clear that Hanlon is willing to walk a stonier path than most young filmmakers.
Get Salon in your mailbox!