After this long trawl, i'm desperate for a shower
dir: Martine Syms
2022
Watching this flick made during the covid era set and filmed at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, the painfully obvious fact hit me that it’s impossible to satirise this setting. It’s beyond satire. Everything that comes out of these people’s mouths sounds like they’re taking the piss.
The first ten minutes of the film involve our main character, being Palace Bryant (Diamond Stingily) having to defend her dissertation for her masters in fine arts. The words that pour forth from the mouths of these people sound like an alien tongue spoken by a species who delight in obscuring all meaning in what they say.
Even though it seems like a strange ritual for its own sake, Palace passes, and has completed her MFA. And that’s it in terms of her academic career, apparently. We spend pretty much 24 hours with Palace as she fends off the urgings of her friends to attend a graduation party that night, that she’s meant to be DJing at.
The whole point of the flick would be obvious if I’d mentioned it earlier: it’s not a film about what it was like to finish an MFA from Bard: it’s about what it was like for an African-American artist to attend school at a so-called bastion of liberalism, only to find out they’re just as racist as the Republican Party.
Yee haw. Palace herself seems to barge through life with few fucks given, but the aggressions, both micro and macro, of people who think they’re “allies”, take a toll on her. She is over being at this school (I have no idea what her work is actually like, other than some brief glimpses at the start of some stuff she threw together her work as a sculptor is referenced but not shown), and over being as a fetishized object even by people who are friendly to her.
This sounds more serious that it actually is, because when I say the film covers a day in the life of…, it mostly consists of Palace having conversations with other young people in the barely comprehensible dialect of the youngs, and mostly being plied with drugs. So many drugs! Palace and the people around her take recreational drugs from pretty much 10 minutes after the film starts until virtually the end.
It's meant to be fun, I guess.
I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to those kinds of experiences in my yoof, but I have to tell you, even on my best days there is no way I could smoke seven or eight joints, do magic mushrooms, lines of coke and bumps of ketamine and large amounts of alcohol without requiring the services of an ambulance or two and a surgeon. That doesn’t sound like a great weekend at the Meredith music festival or the Big Day Out back in the day; it sounds like “they found my body behind a 7/11 dumpster” instead.
Yet Palace, being Palace, barges her way through, though not unscathed. She’s an interesting character, and if there’s an awkwardness there its one shared by many of the other performances by people I am guessing are not professional actors, which is fine. This not only looks and feels like a student film; it seems like a student film made by a student with other students, all acting like students.
There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact I’ve missed seeing stuff like that. It’s just…
Look, I’m the last person who’s going to criticise something for being about young people doing a bunch of drugs and wanting to shag each other. It’s like, the whole point of life, but, I’m realising, at my age now, it’s not as enjoyable to watch way after the fact. All you can think of is some of the worst experiences you had, about some of the other stuff that happened to people you know, and the ones who didn’t eventually put aside their childish crackpipes, and ended up dead or worse.
And as a parent you think “fucking hell, I don’t want my kid doing a tenth of this bullshit”.
I guess as it progresses (there are no stakes, there’s nothing really happening, there’s no narrative tension, artificial or otherwise) it’s meant to be more of a picaresque journey, and Palace remains relentlessly funny before she becomes a staggering mess. But the other people…they’re so irritating. Not being a six-foot African-American artist at a liberal arts college, there’s probably a fair few aspects lost on me in terms of how Palace’s experiences impact upon her (by which I mean the experiences the director wishes to get across). And there are definitely a heap of things I don’t understand about, how shall I say this delicately, um, contemporary human mating rituals?
There’s a scene towards the end where, to use Australian vernacular, a guy is trying to crack on to Palace, and it’s a guy she has had some interest in, but he does something so out of the fucking blue that I was shocked. Shocked I say! I had to stop the movie to recover. Then I played it back and I was even more confused.
I have read articles about people my age or older re-entering the dating pool, so to speak, and being horrified by some of the stuff that people are into these days. Let me be a bit more specific without being more graphic: the articles generally, by cis-het women, express their shock and dismay at what men do /expect / demand in swipe right scenarios contemporarily, fuelled probably by pornography.
I don’t know about any of that, and hope I never will, but let’s just say it’s another instance where this flick made me feel so very old, like I could dry up as a husk and maybe blow away in the wind due to my advanced ancientness…
To go back to my original point, there’s nothing here that happens that can be said to be satirical or a parody of the college experience, or the arts college experience specifically, and as such we learn nothing as to whether a) people should go to arts colleges or b) whether arts colleges aren’t worth the time or effort. It’s just young pretentious occasionally racist people drinking, doing drugs and hooking up, which people have been doing since before Artistotle’s day, much to his chagrin.
So I guess in that context it becomes more about how it’s about the things it’s about. No one celebrated Trainspotting back in the day just because it depicted heroin addiction: it was celebrated because of the hot young actors in it, the banging soundtrack and the way it was filmed. Try hearing Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life without the image of Renton / Ewan McGregor running with that maniacal grin on his face.
Well, this is pretty low budget. The seams show, but that’s not a bad thing. There is a lot of music, almost too much music, but that helps with the cobbled together / almost hand-made aesthetic. There’s some very cheap special effects stuff that I thought was done really well (in scenes where I think Palace might be down the K-hole), which are almost as enjoyable as the scenes where she and friends are swimming in a lake, at all times of the day or night.
For all the drug taking, none of it ends up being political, or like the flick is moralising, and nor is she unscathed by the end. For the longest while I was thinking “no person could drink and take all that and be okay”, and by the end Palace is paying for it heavily (and we have to see it / listen to it ugh), but at least she’s not dead or shot by the cops, which is a not unreasonable expectation.
I “enjoyed” it but I don’t think it’s a great flick. It’s plenty good though, if you have the stomach for pretentious fuck-ups, and clearly I still do.
Who knows for how much longer?
7 times my time at university was nothing like this, but then I was studying economics out of 10
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“Congrats, Palace, you’re a Master of Fine Arts” – now your life truly begins - The African Desperate
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