Upstream Color –
Shane Carruth’s long anticipated follow-up to Primer isn’t going to be an awards season darling. It’s too peculiar, it’s
narrative too nebulous, it’s participants too unknown, but it challenged me
while viewing and moved me emotionally and intellectually for days after. It’s
the type of film perfectly suited to my tastes since my transformation from
film buff and amateur critic to part-time philosophical mediator on
entertainment media (I know that sounds crazy-pretentious but, whatever, I’m
half-joking).
I wasn’t one of those rabid fans impatiently waiting nine
years for Carruth’s sophomore feature. I’d always heard great things about Primer, but wasn’t compelled to watch it
until the night before I saw Upstream
Color. I was still on the fence about seeing the latter and I was using the
former to make the case for it. Even knowing about and handicapping its
impressively low budget, Primer, with
its amateur feel and acting wasn’t exactly easy to get in to, but Carruth’s
ominous score hinted at something to be anticipated and 30-minutes in, I was
captivated by the ideas present in the film and by its ability to elevate
itself well-above its monetary restrictions. It’s a thinking man’s time-travel
flick and everyone else be damned. Overall, Primer
is a very good film and an unbelievably auspicious debut. Carruth’s follow-up,
is a great film and a down-payment on what is likely to be a very promising
career.
In between films, Carruth became a hot commodity, being
approached by Spielberg and Soderbergh and Rian Johnson. He worked for years on
a sci-fi epic called A Topiary that
never garnered the necessary financing and so a smaller film was born in Upstream Color. The plot is essentially
a love story about two people who’ve unknowingly undergone brainwashing and
financial /personal ruin at the hands of the same people, whose method of
control (a worm that feeds on a flower, which grows in a river, where piglets
were drowned, which come from a farm owned by a man…) is as much a part of the
film as anything. There are elements of science-fiction to the story, about
impossible connections between man and woman and man and god and everything
and everything, but they don’t obscure the genuine elements of the story, they
enhance them. They make the feelings and relationship between the two main
characters seem even deeper and spell them out in a creative way that most
romances lack and can only hope to intimate. Upstream Color too is a thinking-man’s film, but at its center is
not a tangled, mystery of mechanism that can be plotted and, with great
diligence, found out. Instead, at its core, is a fairly straightforward film,
with ideas and nuance that appear superficially initially but come into greater
focus with intense reflection and repeated viewing.
In addition to writing and directing the film, Shane Carruth
also co-edited, scored and starred in the feature. It has sat atop my “Best of
2013” list since I saw it back in April, and so has many of its individual
components - like the haunting score and beautiful cinematography. Carruth’s acting,
which is very good, is still the thing he’s least impressive at, especially
when compared to his remarkable co-star, Amy Seimetz, whose performance is
among my favorite of any this year.
Apparently (and hopefully), we won’t have to wait nearly as
long for Carruth’s next film, tentatively titled The Modern Ocean, which is expected to film soon (maybe).
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