All that fork but nothing to eat
dir: Ignacio Maiso
2024
This is not a sequel to The Girl With the Needle or The Dragon with the Girl Tattoo, or any of that lazy nonsense that I’m trying to imply, but it does have “Girl” in the title, and I’m on a run, lately, so.
Forgive me another digression, so soon, so frequent: I was quite saddened by the death of David Lynch recently. I had been, just before his death, and just after, watching Twin Peaks: The Return on one of the too many streaming services I am subscribed to, and enjoying it immensely, finding it now even more poignant upon his death.
And it gave me an opportunity to re-evaluate his body of work, and his approach to filmmaking, seeing as a lot of the time in the past I would often find scenes in his flicks strange, odd for oddness’s sake, or obscure / impenetrable to the point where I sometimes felt like some critics were too embarrassed to admit they had no idea what was happening in his flicks either, and were just screaming “bravo!” as loudly as they could to cover their embarrassment.
It’s only now, having read more from the man himself, and feeling like I have more of an idea as to what he was grasping for in much of his work, it feels like the strangeness that he was trying to achieve even in relatively simple scenes that would seem to go on too long, or to have stretched-out cadences, timings, beats, that he was always or at least often trying to tap into the unconscious, the dream-like, the sometimes unknowable, the horrible and the harrowing, and the beautiful and transporting, and he tried everything to achieve that, whether he got there or not.
And sometimes it maybe didn’t work, and maybe in a lot of instances it did work. Trying to do all of that in combination with trying to make something “commercially viable” always brought him into conflict with producers, tv executives, and film companies, because they don’t give a fuck about any of the above, but they do want the cachet that comes with working with someone so cool and avant garde blah blah.
So when I started watching this flick, this odd flick, and the timing felt “off”, and the editing and shot compositions seemed strange and strained, I think I was mentally in a better place to handle something weirder than usual.
This is a mystery, though probably not a thriller, in that nothing thrilling or even vaguely exciting happens. Mostly, baffled people wander around slowly doing things instigated by someone elsewhere through their phones. And, occasionally, people pick up a fork that’s been left for them by someone else, before they confront a person who may or may not have done something bad to someone they care about, at some point.
That probably sounds like hell on earth to other people. Very rarely the purpose of my reviews is to warn other people from stuff that might think they would enjoy, but even it’s not a self-imposed role that I take very seriously. People will watch whatever they want or not. I don’t believe anyone is more likely to watch something I recommend versus something I rip the shit out of.
I often find negative reviews inspire me more to see certain flicks rather than the alternative, because often we’re like: “Who the fuck are you to tell me what not to watch or enjoy, eh?”
In this case ripping the shit out of it would potentially inspire more people to watch something mediocre, like the transgressive edgelords that they are. So instead I am trying to walk a middling path of explaining why I gave this more time than I otherwise would give something so ineffable.
It starts mysterious, it continues being mysterious as it involves more people being dragged into the mystery of what people are doing, and why, and then it says that there is an explanation for everything that is happening, being the need to get people to remember the terrible things they’ve done, before the film ends, with no explanation for what we’d been watching for the last 100 minutes.
That would be enough to get certain people to throw their phones out of a window or kick in their tv screens. What I’m not talking about is an unsatisfying ending. I often rant and rave about flicks with what I consider to be weak endings, or endings bad enough to render what came before, even if it was okay, pretty shitty.
This film just ends. It’s not that it takes too long to get to the fireworks factory – it never gets there, not even to discover that the fireworks factory is closed for the day. The car just keeps driving by, then flies off a cliff, into darkness…
For me, it didn’t really matter that much. I almost admired that there wasn’t a sensible or meaningful ending. I chose to believe that this meant that whatever transpired during the film is what actually mattered, as people who thought they’d gotten away with certain negligent crimes, gradually discovered that the people they really didn’t want to find out what they’d done, found out what they’d done, because of the activities of some mysterious organisation or whatever.
It didn’t matter to me who did what, because I still somewhat enjoyed this no-frills, $2 shop, Not Quite Right pseudo-Lynch knock off. I don’t always need answers, and, if I took anything away from decades of enjoying his works, Lynch himself implied the answers never really mattered that much anyway. It’s how you can get an audience to feel awe, dread, lust or wonderment that matters, rather than some petty destination you might think you need to get to.
And on that level, I at least felt like I wanted to embrace or at least hold hands awkwardly with the mystery, even if I knew nothing was going to come of it. I don’t even know why it’s called what it’s called. There are other people with forks in the film. The fork symbolises something, but I still don’t know what. But it feels like it should mean something. Maybe it will come to me.
I kinda doubt it. The performances are flat, mostly, and I would think deliberately. There’s an interesting score, which is sometimes intrusive, sometimes atonally horrible just to wake sleeping audience members, perhaps. There are some odd compositional choices, and I’m not a hundred per cent as to whether they’re intentional or just because… limitations. It feels like it was made with no money, which can be an interesting challenge. It conjures a mood, maybe, a very paranoid mood.
Those are all points in its favour. Attacking it further feels unfair. I doubt many people will ever see it or hear of it, even if it’s available on Prime as a rental.
But it exists. I didn’t imagine it. It’s real, even if it maybe doesn’t sound like it is.
5 times I am often baffled by myself out of 10
--
“Daughters. Husbands. Mothers. Sons. We’re all guilty.” - The Girl With the Fork
- 1189 reads