Shane Carruth (2013)

I kept watching Upstream Color hoping it might stop being incomprehensible but it never did.   From about halfway through, I began trying to remember what had attracted me to the film from reading about it in the New Yorker cinema listings – I’d inferred it was sort of science fiction and I recalled that Richard Brody wrote the enthusiastic note so there’d been a double obstacle to negotiate in order to want to see it.   Once I got home and looked up the note I was mystified all over again.  It ends with a sentence so Brodyesque as to verge on self-parody:

‘Skittering, fragmented editing and glowing images suggest a tenuous hold on reason, and also abysses of irreparable loss; subplots of a sound recordist in search of effects, a pig farm with a special allure for the victims, and recurring phrases from Thoreau’s “Walden” intertwine to yield a vision as vast and as natural as it is reflexively cinematic and fiercely compassionate.’

This is Shane Carruth’s second feature:  his first, Primer, also a sci-fi drama, has gained a cult following.   Nine years have elapsed since Primer was released, when Carruth was thirty-two, but he can’t be accused of shirking on Upstream Color (the title was the first thing I didn’t understand).   He directed and wrote the movie; he co-produced it, composed the score, was his own DoP, and co-edited with David Lowery (director of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which is released in America this week).  Carruth also has the principal male role.  He has a striking, foxy look but his image-making is better than his acting.  Amy Seimetz, who plays the central character, is a stronger and more nuanced performer.  Many of the pictures and sounds that Carruth creates, and the interaction between them, are remarkable – it’s just that they don’t make any coherent sense to me.

31 August 2013