Bellflower

dir: Evan Glodell

I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. I’ve watched it twice, and I still don’t know.

But I can tell you that it connected with me, for reasons I cannot fathom as yet.

Let’s fathom those reasons out together, dear reader. Maybe over the course of the review, I’ll be able to figure it out for myself.

This could be a flick about two youngish alcoholics, Woodrow (Evan Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), who really wish they were living in post-apocalyptic times. They don’t seem to have jobs or money, but they have a close friendship, I guess defined by the frequency with which they bellow ‘dude’ and ‘so awesome’ to and at each other. They’re really close, even just for best friends.

I’m not implying anything, I’m just saying. They spend their days talking about some fairly strange stuff, and they do it in a fairly casual way. Mad Max – The Road Warrior seems to have had a fairly profound impact upon them. They don’t just dream of modified beasts of cars, or flamethrowers; they build flamethrowers and modify cars in practical but cumbersome ways.

And, for fun, they chain up a propane tank and shoot it with a shotgun, just to watch it burn under escaping explosive pressure. They are, or at least think they are, preparing for something that the rest of us would desperately hope would never come to pass.

On the other hand, they’re never really talking about this post-apocalyptic stuff in any deep way, or from the perspective of survivalism. It’s mostly about looking cool and being awesome. They’re not even talking about it ironically. They’re not even taking the piss out of themselves, or their motivations, or their actions.

Their spiritual mentor, their Dalai Lama, if you will, is Lord Humongous. To those of you not familiar with the second Mad Max movie, Lord Humongous is what they call the monstrous chap who leads a band of marauders gently killing and raping their way across the Australian wasteland outback.

Except that chap, hockey mask and straining muscles aside, was called The Humungus. And the Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-ah as well, but that’s neither here nor there. Ultimately, the point is that these two friends, sealed into their own weird world as they are by the nature of their lives, have created an architecture and mythology for themselves, and it echoes and vibrates with the fantasy of driving hotted-up muscle cars across the wasteland, not because they have anywhere to go or anything to do, only that they would look so awesome doing so.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call them geeky nerds, because they’re alcoholics and they have practical skills. They’re definitely hipsters, all the same, what with all their affectations and capricious behaviour. Their imaginary gang is called Mother Medusa, and it’s a credit to the flick that they don’t bother to explain anything about it. They’re inside references that mean something to the makers moreso than the characters, since the line between them is deliberately blurry. The flick has, all the way through, the feel of a movie made by friends who didn’t really have a plan beyond making a movie about themselves, filtered through some semblance of a cinematic sensibility. With ‘cool’ being the delivery device and the hoped-for end destination.

And then there’s talk of girls, finally, so we don’t think they’re too close. Woodrow, seemingly the less assertive, less confident of the two, is compelled to take part in a gross-out competition / endurance trial against another alcoholic called Milly (Jessie Wiseman) at a local dive. They bond whilst eating live crickets, or at least whilst getting drunk and talking about having eaten live crickets in competition for a $50 drink voucher.

Woodrow asks Milly out on a date, and when they meet up, they decide to drive to Texas in order to eat at the worst place imaginable. Why? I don’t know. It’s a trip that takes many days, but I guess they don’t have jobs or a reason not to take the road trip. During this time we can presume they fall in love. Woodrow keeps saying to her “this is nice”, and this really is a substitute for dialogue. Nothing, or at least barely anything in the flick seems like it was written on a page. I don’t doubt that there was a screenplay, but nothing spoken sounds like it was exactingly scripted.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the flick is therefore improvised or naturalistic. Far from it. Too much effort, an extraordinary amount of effort is put in to making everything look a certain way. It really is strangely filmed, or at least, far more time and budget (a tiny budget, all the same) were spent on the visuals than on any other aspect of the flick, with the possible exception of the booze budget. I would guess that out of the $17,000 they had in their budget, $10,000 went on alcohol, the rest on cars, flamethrower components and fuel.

They do end up building a flamethrower, a working flamethrower. And by ‘they’, I don’t just mean the characters. The actors / filmmakers themselves built all this stuff, which gives the film some of that inexplicable quality that I found so mysteriously compelling. The flamethrowers and the cars aren’t props. The guys built them to work as described, as planned, and as we get to see. They possess some real engineering skills, some useful skills making it possible to install a whisky dispenser in the dashboard, or exhausts that shoot flames out the back of the car.

The question is what to do with this equipment, and these skills. They’ve devoted them to making a film, to show what they can do. In that sense, the film is like an extended show reel, or calling card. Look, Hollywood, this is what we can do. But with no budget, perhaps they gave up on their initial idea to make a genuine post-apocalyptic action flick. And they made it, adding in some half-hearted elements about the lives of cool, hip, fucked-up people in LA. There is a lot of ‘story’ to do with Milly, and another girl called Courtney (Rebekah Brandes), and a creepy guy called Mike (Vincent Grashaw), and a lot of vicious revenge seeking, betrayal, and brutal violence. Oh, and some really strange scenes of further revenge by having involuntary tattoos engraved on someone’s face. As in, a tattooed moustache and sideburns? It’s very strange.

You could extrapolate from that and say perhaps, considering a serious accident that Woodrow suffers, the post-apocalyptic landscape he’s trying to navigate is that of trying to get over and survive a painful breakup, and fantasising, in violent and gory ways, of getting revenge instead of actually getting revenge on people. It’s hard to know what the original intention was, because the film cheats by having it both ways, and it’s not clear if it was intended from the start, or whether they just chickened out and smushed two distinct and contradictory endings together for no other reason than that the footage existed. It didn’t wreck my appreciation of it, but it did make whatever transpired somewhat more pointless. Or at least it made it somewhat less meaningful, and more about what it looked like along the way.

I didn’t particularly like any the characters, except maybe Woodrow. I didn’t particularly like the acting. I didn’t particularly understand what was going on. And yet somehow I really, really enjoyed the flick. I don’t know if it’s a triumph of the strange visuals, of the unique, or at least mannered aesthetic they’re able to get across on a micro-budget, or the poetic and unsettling inter-titles, or the DIY-ethos Woodrow and Aiden embody. I don’t know what it is, but I really admire this flick.

Maybe it appeals to some embarrassing teenage part of me; maybe I’m remembering having these kinds of discussions with intense friends in my youth. In fact, now that I think about it, we used to fantasise about post-apocalyptic stuff a fair bit. Striding across the wasteland in leathers, swords at the ready, the boring aspects of civilisation stripped away by war or accident, was it something like that?

Did it appeal to us because we preferred it to the encroaching necessity of joining the mundane world of the workaday? I doubt it was about looking cool, or the desire to look cool, since it’s not something I’ve ever achieved or aspired to. I guess it’s fairly common, but it’s not necessarily just a juvenile fantasy. There could be deeper reasons why it resonates with people, and even if they don’t elaborate upon them, even if the film isn’t coherent, it stills carries some potential meaning for these drunken chaps in this flick.

When Aiden is telling a deeply wounded Woodrow that all their reasons for coming to and staying in LA no longer matter, it’s an admission that maybe their dreams of success in the movie industry, which they’ve held onto for a long while, will come to nothing, and that they should just leave. Since we have no idea what these guys do apart from drink and live in squalor, it’s hard not to feel that it’s the actors and not the characters talking, if there is any difference. And that feels like a truth of their lives, of their friendship, that transcends everything else.

In the face of that, saying that they should just drive away, just fucking drive, does sound like freedom. If they aspire to do nothing but drive to new places and find scenarios where they look the coolest, it can’t be worse than what they’re doing and how their living now.

I really liked this film, and yet I’m still not really sure why, even after all these words, ever so many words. I really hope Evan Glodell gets to make more films, because there is some considerable cinematic talent at play here, and it’s always a shame to let talent go to waste. I hope this flick, which is so much more than a stepping stone, leads to brighter days and more complicated work.

Perhaps the next Mad Max flick, okay?

Get right on it, Hollywood. Don’t let me down.

7 times the random suicide moment towards the end of the flick is beyond ludicrous out of 10

--
“Things will go bad. They always do.” – Bellflower