SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: After watching Shane Carruth’s mystifyingly cryptic yet oddly hypnotic second film Upstream Color, I now feel less awkward about failing to entirely 'get’ his idiosyncratic, Sundance prize-winning 2004 debut, Primer, in which young men invented a time machine (or something of that ilk) in their backyard.
This is a film in which characters are often introduced only to disappear without rhyme or reason
My Primer experience was discoloured by my seeing it in an overseas film festival in less than ideal conditions, struggling to keep awake due to festival-fatigue, and failing to catch much of the muffled dialogue. Upstream Color, however, I watched in a small theatrette with a dynamic sound system. This time there’s not much dialogue to catch.
One of the things that makes this quasi-science fiction mystery so different from not only most US independents but cinema from anywhere, is its reliance on imagery, sound, editing and music to transmit what we might, for want of a better term, call its 'story’. What little dialogue there is tends not to be very helpful, consisting either of a series of red herrings or irrelevancies – though deciding which of these applies is quite a challenge.
This is a film in which characters are often introduced only to disappear without rhyme or reason. In the opening 15 minutes, a young North American woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) is ambushed out back at the studio where she works as a digital special effects editor. Clamping a breathing mask over her face, her assailant forces her to ingest a grub – one we’ve seen being dug up from an allotment during the film’s opening minutes.
The remainder of the film is probably best interpreted – and this is freewheeling guesswork – as Kris’s fever-dream, caused by mental changes induced by her ingestion of the bug, which has transformed into a worm that we see crawling at various points around her insides.
Kris is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Not that she literally narrates, but in the sense that we see the world largely through her own eyes. And what a bizarre world it is. When we see her freaked out by a worm crawling in Cronenbergian fashion just beneath her skin, it’s not entirely clear whether this is really happening or the result of hallucination. (My instinct is that it’s the former; others may disagree.) What precisely occurs when a strange man later appears to operate on her and a pig, as they lie side by side, is also unclear. Here I was reminded of Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 feature O Lucky Man! but maybe that’s just me.
At these two points, the film threatens to take a left turn into body horror, but the moments pass, so that what unfolds is closer to a dream with some disturbing elements than a 24-carat nightmare.
Carruth not only directs, produces, co-writes, co-edits and plays a dark-haired character named Jeff (Kris’s love interest), he also wrote the extraordinarily effective electronic score, served as the DOP and helped out on camera operating duties. There’s no question he knows how to use film technique to hold an audience’s attention despite a baffling narrative. Notable here is the discontinuous editing from Carruth and David Lowery, which, like Douglas Krise’s similarly impressive work on Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, moves the film forwards (and in this case, possibly backwards, though it’s often hard to tell) via a highly sensual and dynamic stream of images.
Many will hold on in the hope that all will be ultimately explained (who the frick is Pig Man?!), but Carruth gently prepares us for a more perverse outcome by building in long breaks at several intervals where the screen goes black for several seconds. It’s as if he’s warning us the film will end like this; abruptly, its mysteries intact.
Is there a 'true’ meaning to be divined and decoded here? Like Richard Kelly and Christopher Nolan, Carruth probably figures the best way to build a cult reputation is to invite further viewings to make better sense of it all and encourage the audience to debate the film online. Maybe we’ll see the release of a Donnie Darko-style 'Director’s Cut’ down the track, purporting to filling in some of the gaps.
But to my mind, trying to explain the film in narrative terms is to miss the point, as is the laughable decision to load up its media kit with a 'further reading" list, featuring links to articles with titles such as 'Shane Carruth Reveals the Mysteries of Upstream Color" and 'Untangling and Understanding the Narrative of Upstream Color". These I refused to read before writing this review on principle.
The film makes best (non) sense as a semi-abstraction, one possibly heavily influenced by alien abduction stories, which often describe what we essentially witness here: invasive surgery procedures fuzzily recalled as if through a drugged stupor.
Are some of these characters aliens; are they the same person viewed differently at different moments? Or are they figments of Kris’s imagination? By the end of the film I had no idea and had given up caring. Considered as a sophisticated and lengthy music video, the film’s mess-with-your-head plotline is par for the course. Carruth’s minimalistic electronic score – which runs through most of the film’s running time – is absolutely mesmerising. Not only is he a master of visual montage, he’s quite a composer.
