Los Golfos

                          

Carlos Saura's Los Golfos (aka The Delinquents) is a corrosive and impressively assured first feature. Produced by Pere Portabella, the film debuted at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. Its portrait of disaffected youth living in the seamy underbelly of Madrid did not meet the approval of Franco's censors. After extensive cuts, a truncated version had a cursory release in Spain in 1962. The uncut print has only recently been reassembled and is available on a handsome looking disc put out by Radiance Films.

The film centers on a group of six young urban miscreants who participate in petty crime to survive, sometimes with the help of their moll, Visi. The hooligans rob blind ladies, pilfer fruit, assault cab drivers, loot garages, and more. No mentors or father figures exist to steer the youth towards virtue, an unspoken legacy of the Spanish Civil War. Much of the film functions as a documentary about the more sordid side of Madrid. However, Saura never flattens the characterizations into a neorealist lump. Each of the six youths is given a vibrant and distinct personality. One of the youths, Juan, shows promise as a matador, so the others pledge to steal enough money in order to jump start his career. They succeed, though at a terrible cost, and the film concludes not with Juan's triumph, but with the most depressing and despairing bull fight ever captured on film; as opposed to all those jolly ones.

Saura combines bracing neorealism with the nihilistic despair of Buñuel's Los Olvidados. The images of slum life, like women gleaning what they can from the town dump, are worthy of that master. Saura's juxtapositions are continually inventive and provocative. Fado and flamenco are contrasted with a Latin dance band out of the 1930s or a hip jazz club where the necking clubgoers are digging Gerry Mulligan. Regardless of their diversions, this is a portrait of a lost generation.

Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

Despite enjoying the director's previous work, I found Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme to be overblown, gaseous, and empty. It doesn't matter to me that the ping pong prodigy played by Timothée Chalamet is unlikeable, but I found the character to be fatally uninteresting. Chalamet has proven he can play a Jewish hustler with his impersonation of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, but Marty lacks the charisma and chutzpah of a Dylan or a Sidney Falco or Sammy Glick. I think that Safdie and his co-writer Ronald Bronstein wanted to capture the Jewish magical realism found in works like Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, but the results are neither magical nor realistic. Safdie shoots the material with lots of close-ups, trying to give this period film immediacy. In this he partially succeeds, but at the cost of giving his film a realistic framework. The use of circa 1980 pop songs indicates he wanted to conjure something more timeless and mythic, but the character of Marty is not interesting or heroic enough to support the stuff of legend.

Safdie continues to be interesting in his handling of his players. I especially enjoyed the efforts of Odessa A'zion, Abel Ferrara, Penn Jillette, and Pico Iyer. However, a number of talented performers are stuck in cliched roles or ones that barely register, such as Fran Drescher, Kevin O'Leary, and Sandra Bernhard. Gwyneth Paltrow is promisingly cast as a Grace Kelly type figure, but has little to do except act bemused by Marty. I did enjoy the Tennessee Williams take-off, but too much of Marty Supreme, like the Moses the dog subplot, is overly convoluted and arbitrary. Marty's actions are rarely consistent with his character. While Marty Supreme has some interesting moments sprinkled throughout its two and a half hours, overall I found it to be a disappointment. 

Backrooms

Whatever their artistic merits, the commercial success of Kane Parsons' Backrooms and Curry Barker's Obsession is a truly heartening sign of life for the American film industry. Before the summer onslaught of sequels, retreads, and video game adaptations, it was very pleasing to film buff Biff that two original films from newcomers are runaway box office successes. After viewing Backrooms, I was particularly chuffed that such an abstract and avant leaning film has been embraced by the US public, particularly by those 35 and under. It is A24's biggest hit to date, already outgrossing Marty Supreme. Backrooms has a plot, but its chief attribute, which commences once Chiwetel Ejiofor discovers a portal to a parallel world in the basement of his furniture store, is Parsons' camera prowling the negative space of a world redolent of corporate offices and strip malls. This conveys a sense of dread that lingers despite the narrative seeming like a distended Twilight Zone episode. 

Ejofor plays Clark, a frustrated architect living in a mythical city in 1990 who manages a pathetic furniture store for his daily bread. He has recently undergone a painful divorce and attends therapy session with his doc, Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve). After Clark discovers the portal, he enlists two collegiate videographers to document what he has discovered. Unsurprisingly, the duo become the film's sacrificial lambs for a monster lurks in the maze of this mysterious kingdom. Mary Kline becomes concerned about Clark and stumbles upon the portal. Flashbacks of her childhood, when she was a prisoner in the house of her mad mother, illuminate her struggle to metaphorically and literally walk through windows. A single survivor is left at film's end. A high tech firm has been monitoring the parallel world and is able to make an extraction. A company pooh-bah (deftly played by Mark Duplass) debriefs the survivor, functioning much like Simon Oakland's character in Psycho. As in Psycho, the explanation given mystifies rather than clarifies.

The visual landscape of Backrooms is a picture of suburban desolation and anomie. Indeed, the suburban strip malls of America in 2026 are even more empty after the rise of internet retailers. As the musical group Priests put it:

                           I was jogging to a strip mall

                           I felt nothing at all

                          Nothing I can recall

                          Besides Dollar Tree, Sears and Thai Bistro

Even before we enter the film's Interzone, the portrait of 1990 America is depressing. The colors of the costumes and decor are subdued and ugly. The film is a symphony in taupe and off white. Even when a color like blue is used it is a subdued blue rather than a vivid one. This fits the emotional tenor of the film. Clark and Mary both live a lonely existence, each haunted by the demons of the past. Ejiofor and Reinsve limn their characters' stress and isolation superbly. I was somewhat distracted by Reinsve's Norwegian accent, but that is a very minor complaint.  

Master Parsons and screenwriter Will Soodik have extrapolated Backrooms from Parsons' YouTube series of the same name. However, the idea for this project did not just emerge full blown like an Athena from the cheesypastaverse. There are antecedents. Mark Z. Danielewski's 2000 horror novel House of Leaves has a similar premise. While Parsons' characters travel horizontally into an alternative multiverse, Danielewski's descend vertically into darkness. With its labyrinthine tracking shots, Backrooms reminded me of Michael Snow's Wavelength and Kubrick's The Shining. Indeed, the labyrinth is the one of the central motifs in Kubrick's oeuvre. Regardless, I feel Backrooms can stand on its own. I don't think it is a great film, but it is a startling debut.