Novi događaj u tradiciji ranog Lyncha, Guya Maddina i Crispina Glovera.
“An astonishing, out-of-nowhere film. Amidst all the cookie-cutter indies, Aaron Schimberg’s Go Down Death casts a mysterious spell. A dreamy, highly stylized affair recalling early David Lynch. Highly recommended.” – Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine
“A unique, strange, unforgettable film, a half-remembered dream that will trouble and beguile the subconscious long after you’ve moved on. (A-)” – Gabe Toro, Indiewire
“One of the best films of the year! An uncompromising feast of vision and atmosphere.” – Kentucker Audley, NoBudge
“Robert Altman meets Tod Browning… an immaculate, offbeat triumph. Rarely do homespun independent filmmakers convey such a distinctively original vision.” – Jon Dieringer, Screen Slate
“Irresistible! Evokes the great novels of William Faulkner, even as Go Down Death offers us a resolutely modern filmic experience. Schimberg appropriates the language of cinema and obeys only the rules he sets out for himself. The result is a thrilling leap into the unknown.” – Simon Laperrière, Fantasia
“Go Down Death is as eccentric and daring as American indie cinema gets.” – Matthew Campbell, Starz Denver
Fantasia Film Festival Review: 'Go Down Death' A Unique, Strange & Unforgettable Directorial Debut
Jonathan Mallory Sinus is
credited as the “folklorist” responsible for the vignettes that follow at the
beginning of “Go Down Death,” the closing film at the Fantasia Film Festival.
What follows is a beautiful woman applying makeup and a man on guitar. Some of
the world’s greatest filmmakers would argue that these are the only elements
one needs to make a great film. The picture continues through its opening
credits, introducing us to a doctor that overshares to a kind-eyed boy, and a
double-amputee emphasizing liberation from his own legs as if his body were
originally a vessel for a lie. Director Aaron Schimberg’s credit appears over
the screams of a woman trapped inside a car, fighting for her life. This is a
filmmaker with a very specific sensibility in regards to mortality.
The picture slowly reveals
itself as existing in a limbo between life or death, with a cast of characters
waiting out what feels like a temporary state of mind. Some bicker at a table
while playing cards. Two soldiers stalk the woods while fighting an unseen war.
A woman sings about being “too young to die,” a song that consists of only
those lyrics as if heard in a dream. Most speak in dialogue that sounds like
detached song lyrics. “Go Down Death” isn’t necessarily about speakers, but
about listeners: Schimberg’s camera enjoys capturing the furrowing of a brow,
the quiet serenity of the thinking mind.
A shapely prostitute recoils
nude after intercourse, sharing company with a comfortably naked older man, who
has a greater interest in smoking while discussing long-forgotten memories than
comforting her. His nudity seems indicative of the vulnerability of his age;
she, younger, covers up in the fetal position, not interested in exploring a
past, one that involves a dead twin sister. She is beautiful, wounded when we
meet her. His shaggy hair and comfort within his skin suggests he’s shed the
world beyond him. A classroom of children illustrates the same; kids who
casually mention two of their group have passed on, before they trade passages
of poetry concerned with death.
The characters speak of
haunting frequently. One describes himself as being mistaken for a demon, one
who recurs in dreams. Later, two characters utter the same line about being
haunted, but never being allowed to haunt another. Most seem to just be passing
through: they act as if they have fully-established relationships with each
other, when it seems clear they are merely grafting past unions onto partial or
complete strangers. One character speaks of Sinus as if he were a fellow
soldier, returned as a ghost; he says it’s a “story.” It leads to a breakdown
in communication, suggesting the artist is aware of his own shortcomings from
within the text.
About fifty-something minutes
into “Go Down Death,” which is largely plotless, the film begins to jump in
shorter, darker bursts. The camaraderie between each character slides away,
replaced by an adversarial mistrust, until the story is accompanied by the
flickering of a film, projected onto the side of a barn for children. “Go Down
Death” closes with a bewildering fifteen or so minutes that may or may not be
related to the previous seventy, a passage of film of which I am eager to hear
multiple interpretations from a variety of voices.
Sinus, of course, is not a
real person, and there is no evidence of his “writings” in the real world. And
yet “Go Down Death” seems like a tribute to a false creator, teaming all of his
creations in a purgatory where their stories, already ended, are permitted to
go on. When one character loses her senses before sex, another remarks that it
has happened to him before. It’s the tapestry of death, one where our creations
mingle in the mind long after our passing, the idea of artistic permanence in
the afterlife. This is a unique, strange, unforgettable film, a half-remembered
dream that will trouble and beguile the subconscious long after you’ve moved
on. Fans of “Eraserhead,” or the avant-guard eccentricities of Crispin Glover’s
infamous traveling art projects, will have found a kindred spirit in director
Aaron Schimberg. [A-] - blogs.indiewire.com/
Go Down Death: Film Review
Aaron Schimberg's debut is a Guy Maddin-imitating experiment with pretension to spare.
MONTREAL — A difficult-to-watch experimental feature that revels in obscurity to the point of abandoning ship near the end and transforming into an entirely different movie, Aaron Schimberg's Go Down Death is the kind of film one suspects admirers choose to like as a dare: "What do you mean, you don't get it? Go back to your Masterpiece Theater, old man." Though some daring indie exhibitors may give it a chance, comparisons to debuts like Eraserhead and Tales from the Gimli Hospital are way, way off the mark; any commercial value probably depends on Schimberg making more compelling work down the road, thus creating a home-video audience for this opening salvo.
The Guy Maddin comparison is a natural one in many ways, as Death
has superficial similarities: Grainy black-and-white (film)
cinematography, bad-splice edits and intentionally stilted acting all
are modeled on his aesthetic. There are even amputees and an accordion.
But this film neither really embraces the mechanics of primitive cinema
nor creates a coherent syntax of its own. Though Jimmy Lee Phelan's
photography appeals, and the design elements cohere in a "we've turned
an empty warehouse into a WWI-era netherworld" sort of way, the
direction itself lacks the distinctive sensibility that make even
Maddin's most challenging efforts impossible to ignore.
Opening titles citing a fictitious folklorist as inspiration are misleading, as the narrative impulse (folk tale-based or otherwise) is almost entirely lacking here. Rather than a story or sense of place, the film offers a collection of vignettes whose stagey monologues have little to do with each other; their strongest connection is the sound of artillery in the distance and characters' propensity for desolate, off-key singing. Men sit in bedrooms talking to whores, taunt each other at the poker table, and patrol the woods for an unidentified army; two actors reminisce about a very tender mutton chop they could've sworn was actually pork.
Soon after an apparent snakeoil salesman gets beat up by a man in a gorilla suit, the movie decides it's had enough: Suddenly we're in a contemporary urban apartment, where a few couples engage in dinner-party talk that fairly screams "we live in Brooklyn." The conversation is mercifully brief, but it's almost dull enough to make a viewer wish Schimberg would cut back to the kid singing about his horse named Boredom and a cow called Mediocrity.
Opening titles citing a fictitious folklorist as inspiration are misleading, as the narrative impulse (folk tale-based or otherwise) is almost entirely lacking here. Rather than a story or sense of place, the film offers a collection of vignettes whose stagey monologues have little to do with each other; their strongest connection is the sound of artillery in the distance and characters' propensity for desolate, off-key singing. Men sit in bedrooms talking to whores, taunt each other at the poker table, and patrol the woods for an unidentified army; two actors reminisce about a very tender mutton chop they could've sworn was actually pork.
Soon after an apparent snakeoil salesman gets beat up by a man in a gorilla suit, the movie decides it's had enough: Suddenly we're in a contemporary urban apartment, where a few couples engage in dinner-party talk that fairly screams "we live in Brooklyn." The conversation is mercifully brief, but it's almost dull enough to make a viewer wish Schimberg would cut back to the kid singing about his horse named Boredom and a cow called Mediocrity.
Aaron Schimberg
by Nov 21, 2013
Still image from Go Down Death, 2013. All images courtesy of Aaron Schimberg.
I was exposed to Aaron Schimberg’s cinema before we actually met. Aaron submitted work for the first-ever screening my work, a spread of short films curated with Showpaper in 2009. Among the usual thumb-sucking Coney Island mope-core and corporate-ready thesis films, Aaron’s trio of miniDV shorts (made with his wife and producer Vanessa McDonnell) immediately stood out, made with both a knowing physical lightness and utter precision of tone. Unpredictably hitting new note after new note whenever I thought my eyeballs had settled back down, the films were playful, dark, conversant with death, never enamored of their own beauty, but not self-flagellating either. (The whole trio is available as a standalone short, Late Spring/Regrets For Our Youth, here.)
Later on, I heard murmurs that Aaron was making his first feature, holed up in a former paint factory in Greenpoint. That film became Go Down Death and has been in production for more years than I can count on one hand, filmed entirely indoors (no ceilings) on Super-16 with a cast of dozens-if-not-hundreds. Death would have an uphill battle on its hands even if it weren’t excellent: under the reference points cosmetically affixed to Schimberg’s mise-en-scene (David Lynch, Tom Waits, Guy Maddin) lies an almost terrifyingly bleak worldview, served up in a final scene that knifes straight through the preceding 80 minutes and makes you reconsider everything you just watched.
Aaron Schimberg So you’re gonna fix this to make me sound like a genius, right?
Steve MacFarlane (laughter) Uh, let’s
start with all the comparisons to name directors. The homage is more in
the look of your film than in the actual substance of it.
AS I consciously was trying—and telling
everybody when we were making it—that we were trying to avoid any
specific references. It’s not supposed to evoke the 1920s, or
expressionism, or any kind of specific period, real world or cinematic.
You’re not really supposed to know when it’s from. It’s not too
realistic either. Striking that balance was one of the hardest things.
People at the first screening thought that we really shot in it in a
forest; to me, it’s completely phony, it looks fake. But it’s sort of
hard while you’re watching the film to tell what’s real and what isn’t.
SM Even the timbre of one character’s voice, or the choice of a spoken phrase, can come off as totally contemporary.
AS Exactly.
SM So instead of talking about what you
wanted to avoid, can you tell me a little bit about what you wanted to
make happen? This wasn’t written as a “period” film, right?
AS Well, the script called for a kind of
rural setting. We visited a few villages initially. But they were mostly
unfeasible. For one thing, I’m lazy and I didn’t want to leave my cat.
The main reason is, I’m from the city; I’ve always lived in the city and
I didn’t want to go to some rural place and pretend I was Walker Evans,
or be exploitative like Shelby Lee Adams, or whatever that guy’s name
is.
This film is—maybe not on the surface like Sweet Smell of Success or Driller Killer
or anything—but it is in fact a very New York film. It was shot in
industrial Brooklyn; everybody in the film is from New York, everybody’s
got a sort of a New York dialect or accent. It’s kind of a running
joke, you know, that a guy playing a farmer is really a bookie. He hates
the woods. He’s afraid of lyme disease. He wouldn’t know the first
thing about farming. That incongruity is part of the film’s character,
and the skeletal garden in the film is a nod to that.The dialogue in the script is stylized, it’s not colloquial. It’s kind of austere. And so initially I wanted everybody to be speaking in a uniformly stylized way. When we were casting, and building, it dawned on me that I couldn’t rehearse to that degree, we’re putting out open calls and casting a lot of non-actors, so what I started to look for was people who could take this dialogue, and interpret it in some personal way. So even though all the dialogue was very homogenous, everybody is performing it in wildly different ways. And it lends the film a kind of vaudevillian aspect.
Still image from Go Down Death, 2013.
SM Well, making a movie is vaudevillian in
and of itself sometimes—no matter how rigidly you have what the scene’s
going to be like set up in your mind, shooting changes everything. New
flavors get brought in, often forcibly, and you have to improvise—“Oh,
this character has an accent now!” In my experience, you never figure
out if you prefer the original dream-version or the tangible, final one.
Deep down, do you wish you had had more time to rehearse?
AS I think I grew to appreciate it, and
having those limitations gives the film a chaotic feeling. Frankly, I’m
amazed that we pulled it off, and we had forty speaking roles, and we
were still casting as we were shooting. It was all done on the fly. I
like this combination of complete chaos and fastidiousness.
SM There was a conscious decision to avoid naturalism at all costs? I assume the sets were constructed way ahead of time.
AS As much as we could in a week, before
shooting started. Literally between takes we would be taking down or
reorganizing or rebuilding the sets to become other rooms or spaces.
SM Really? The amount of texture in the film
is nuts. The card table has a shag carpet, for instance, that probably
appears in like two shots. Is this level of art direction going to be a
signature of yours in future films, do you think?
AS No!
SM I don’t actually think of the film as trying to hide the fact that it was made in New York.
AS Well, I can’t hide it, because I need my
New York State film tax credit. The film is constantly referring to
“the city.” We were playing with that. There are a lot of films about,
you know, nature breaking through the thin veneer of civilization, but
in some ways this film was about the opposite; civilization keeps
breaking through the veneer of nature. Which we built. Until the last
scene, when that veneer falls away completely.
SM This slogan that appears in the film, “NO
PITY FOR THE PAST.” Is that something you wrote originally, or did you
hear it somewhere?
AS That’s an original slogan. I think.
SM It’s great.
AS In this city, we show no pity for the past. Did you interpret that as a positive thing?
SM No. I wouldn’t recommend that attitude
personally or historically or whatever. But it’s prevalent. We pride
ourselves on being “forward-thinking,” but it can be actually closer to
spite.
Still image from Go Down Death, 2013.
AS Yeah. To me it’s like a Bloombergian mantra. Bloombergesque? I hope this doesn’t interfere with my tax credit.
SM In the opening of Go Down Death, a
woman is screaming while something awful happens to her, and you see it
through the rear-view of a car—I think it’s a taxi cab. It’s not a
horror film, really at all, but it you seem to be playing with that
vernacular. I felt like something terrible was happening at all times,
but information was always withheld.
AS The looming presence is unspecified. It
was inspired by something more specific, which is alluded to obliquely,
but to me, it’s about the people in this village who are living under
the threat of crisis. And, you know, we also live under the constant
threat of crisis.
SM I guess I’d call it the threat of the feeling of constant crisis.
AS Right. Somebody asked me why the
characters are so apathetic when explosions are going off all around
them. I guess to me, that’s not unusual. It might seem unusual to us,
because for us the explosions are occurring “over there.”
SM Would you say that’s apathy, or denial? Not that they’re mutually exclusive.
AS It’s denial. I think that people in any
kind of crisis or catastrophe—existential, political, environmental,
something a little more immediate—can learn to adapt to those situations
with denial. Well, I can’t speak for others, but I’ve got a highly
refined denial mechanism. Of course, denied emotions resurface as
ulcers or irritable bowel syndrome. Maybe that’s why everyone in the
village seems to have medical problems.
SM The first time I saw the movie I thought it was more—pardon this term—miserablist
than I do now. These scenes and setups suggest that tone, but the
individual scenes are actually really spontaneous. Somebody will say or
do something eerie and ominous and then it’s almost deflated by comedy,
so you have these weird tonal shifts.
AS The tonal shifts are very built-in. It’s
unclear to what extent the film is comic or tragic, even to me. I’ve
watched it and found some part of it hilarious, and the next time I see
it, I find that same part depressing or disturbing. And screenings are
that way too—there’s resounding laughter at one, and dead quiet at
another. I find a way to be devastated either way. Even when people are
laughing, it’s always the other half of the room; they’re laughing at
different things. I think that’s the difficulty with marketing this
film—it’s none of those things.
People looking for a horror film have approached me and inevitably
been disappointed, but people have also picked up on the tragic side and
talked about how miserablist it is; other people are surprised by the
sheer amount of comedy. But it can play differently and I was
encouraging that as we were shooting it. Again, this is reinforced by
the different acting styles: you’ll have somebody completely
melodramatic, or self-aware and comedic, and then somebody who’s
practically Shakespearian. The first scene we shot was written to be
more comedic, but the two actors played it in the most serious possible
manner, and I found it affecting—but then I might watch it again and
think that the scene is even funnier because it’s so inappropriately
melodramatic.
SM It does seem some of the actors interpreted a “period flavor” that you may not have slathered on top of them.
AS Some actors wanted to know what their
method needed to be. I was evasive, or I would tell them conflicting
things. I wanted everybody in the film looking a little bit confused and
lost. I was encouraging that.
SM The looming, kind of mounting dread you’re
talking about is, in my opinion, achieved more through the acting,
images and edits than maybe through the screenplay itself.
Is it fair to say the character of the kid, Butler (Rayvin Disla,
above), becomes aware of something that the rest of the town is
oblivious to?
AS Perhaps he’s more aware, but on the other
hand, maybe he’s less aware, and therefore less apathetic—he’s trying to
do something constructive amid all this destruction. Although maybe
that’s just another form of denial.
Butler’s curious, he’s active. He does all these jobs—he’s a
gardener, a tailor, he writes poetry—and his doctor is maybe trying to
discourage that, for whatever reason. He’s trying to get Butler to do
clerical work.
SM He’s discouraged by a lot of the men in the village.
AS In the script, Butler was one of many
characters, but when you see a cute child onscreen, you’re immediately
drawn to him. He becomes a protagonist. I actively set out to not have
any protagonists, but it’s a difficult task. The characters were not
supposed to stand out from one another, and they may represent different
things, but you don’t shouldn’t necessarily favor one over the other.
This should have been obvious to me, but once you put it onscreen
people are drawn to one person for some reason or another, because one
actor is taller or something. It became an editing challenge, to try to
guide the audience into not caring about one person over another. Not
wanting one person to live over another, specifically.
Still image from Go Down Death, 2013.
SM In the movie theater scene, he’s the only
one who’s not enjoying the violence. The other kids are laughing. That
gets into what you’re talking about. It’s literally a scene about
people—children—preferring to watch one type of man over another.
AS That scene is the most distilled example
of this power struggle between two characters. You have a guy who’s a
strongman and you have another guy who’s smaller and weaker; the
film-within-a-film is manipulating the audience within the film to side
with one, and I think almost every scene in the film contains a
variation on this dynamic. Almost every scene is a dialogue between two
people and there’s always some kind of power struggle.
It’s not always clear who’s winning out. I think the film questions
whether the need to dominate comes from insecurity or weakness and also
whether suffering silently—as other people do in the film—comes from
some kind of inner strength or if that’s weakness unto itself.
SM Entering into a scene, your edits are all
over the place spatially. For example, when the kid is in the doctor’s
office, you pingpong from the signs on the wall to the guy who’s
speaking to the kid in the chair to the tools on the table, then kind of
settle down on a perspective. This is especially sweet in the epilogue.
Why do you like that activity so much?
AS We sort of figured it out as a way for us
to establish the rhythm of the film, that we’re not sticking with
anybody for too long, that what follows might be confusing. If we
started it with a scene that was five minutes long, as I did initially,
you might get too comfortable; we tried to make the first ten minutes as
hectic as possible so you wouldn’t become too emotionally engaged in
any one person, so it was clear that we would be jumping around.
SM Other people who’ve seen the film
questioned the validity of “blocking” the viewer from getting into any
one specific character. Is it a specific style of narrative you wanted,
or…?
AS Again, if you become too attached to one
person, you might not care about the others. If somebody died, I didn’t
want you to prioritize one death over another. Care about everybody
equally, even if that means you can’t care about anything.
SM A question of proportionality.
AS Well, yeah. On the subway, when you’re
observing people around you, you don’t know them, you can’t. They might
be talking to each other, but you don’t know what the nature of their
relationship is.
SM It’s probably better to assume you don’t know.
AS This film asks you to relate to the
characters in a similar manner. I think between every
character—almost—you can’t quite tell what their relationships are. Some
people may have known each other for 20 years, or they could be
strangers. I don’t know if that makes it hard to relate to what’s
onscreen, but it helps to view them as you might view strangers you’ll
see in real life. You’ll catch yourself assuming things and building
stories for them, but they’re still strangers.
SM Is this a problem you saw in other films and you wanted to do your bit to amend it? Or is it just how the script shook out?
AS It wasn’t meant as a hostile gesture, but I
don’t like the Syd Field method or whatever, in which you need to know
the character’s psychological history, that their father was an
alcoholic or whatever.
SM Which makes their background replicable in some weird way.
AS You shouldn’t need to know backstory, or
psychology, in order to empathize with or relate to people. If you meet
somebody, in a split second you’ll have a connection to them—good or
bad—fair or unfair—without specifically knowing anything about them.
Viewers have occasionally empathized with somebody, but you know,
the difficulty is that there are other people that they don’t, or can’t,
empathize with. They’re too remote. I’ve found that different people
relate to different characters when they watch the movie. A lot of
people are drawn to Butler, but other people are drawn to other
characters entirely. I worry that it has less to do with the characters
and more to do with external factors—how attractive they are, how kind
or unkind the actor seems.
SM You found yourself choosing a scene more based on its depiction of the village as whole.
AS Well, it becomes more like a musical
structure. It’s balancing the tonal shifts and trying to give enough
plot information to allow the viewer to keep following it. There are so
many characters, so many things are so brief that it’s hard to keep
track of people sometimes.
SM It’s murky. I definitely understood more the second time I saw it.
AS it’s hard with a film like this to know
what the audience will easily pick up on or what they will never pick up
on. There are things in the film that to me were extremely clear, but
went unnoticed and prevented people from understanding the film and
things that I never noticed were what everybody wanted to talk about. It
made us try to create a more experiential film.
Now, for people in some of these reviews to say I’m just fucking
with people, or trying to be weird—I mean, you don’t spend seven years
on a film that you’re making in bad faith. You just don’t. The film is
personal and there’s nothing in it that intentionally doesn’t make
sense. Now, that said: specific explanations about why this is
happening, about individual characters . . . I was truly hoping that
viewers would be willing to fill in the blanks.
SM Not just able but willing to try to
do that. It reminds me of pre-screening for certain unnamed film
festival festivals. Anything that seems to pose a threat to your
movie-processing faculties, might not make it. It has to be, you know, legible.
AS Which is a scary thing, because it
discourages filmmakers from experimenting, or if a filmmaker does
experiment, he or she does so at his or her own peril. The thing that
makes film different from other art forms: you write a novel, people
read it, they don’t like it, you put it in a drawer, you rewrite it, you
do another novel. If you’re a painter, you slash the canvas. But when
you go into making a film, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out,
but it has to get out there either way. There’s money on the line,
there’s time, there’s a lot of people’s efforts. In most cases it’s
already public knowledge before it’s done.
SM You have to trailerize the movie before you’ve shot it.
AS And it’s been announced, so it’s going to
get out there. There’s nothing you can do if you can’t afford to reshoot
the footage. Filmmaking is hard and risky because each film is an
experiment and they’re all going to escape. It’s not something where you
say “Oh, this isn’t working out so I’ll go make another film, then.”
You can’t say, “Sorry everybody.”
SM It’s bloodsport, but the most you’re competing for is three hours of somebody’s time, tops. But probably more like 65 minutes.
AS Exactly. For some reason people want
their films to be as short as possible, now. New films are not allowed
to be over two hours unless it’s Batman.
SM Your film reminds me of McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
You spend time with a ton of people but you probably have more empathy
for the people you spent less time with. They’re just not as weak. There
are moments in Go Down Death where you want to judge a character but you can’t—you just don’t know enough about them.
AS Yeah, we’d screen it to people and they’d
say, “I hate that guy. Don’t show me that guy. That guy comes onscreen,
my brain shuts down.” What do you do with something like that? Often,
people would say “more Butler.”
There was a scene in the first cut that was everybody’s favorite—I
immediately cut it out. It was not because I wanted to be aggressive, or
as punishment; it was because I felt that that scene—which was sort of a
comic relief bit—was hurting the film because it was influencing the
way people were watching the film. It wasn’t right; people enjoyed it as
they were watching it but that doesn’t mean it was good for the film.
And nobody missed it when it was gone. - bombsite.com/
It
came from Brooklyn (a warehouse in Greenpoint to be exact), but it is set in a
fantasy world unconstrained by narrative logic.
There is little employment in this shunned village, yet young Butler
holds down a multitude of jobs, including grave-digging. He will be busy. Life is indeed poor, nasty, brutish, and
short, but words hold great significance in Aaron Schimberg’s Go Down Death (trailer here), which screens
tomorrow during the 2013 Fantasia International Film Festival.
This
is
Jonathan Mallory Sinus’s world. The
celebrated poet not only created the sickly village, he also lives there
as a character. Sinus is the one who amputated both his legs
for his own existential satisfaction. Disease and suffering are
commonplace in
this environment, as Butler soon learns—sort of. It is hard to put much
stock in his doctor’s
diagnoses, given his shape-shifting and his stalker-like behavior.
Most
of the men inside the hamlet spend their time playing cards and frequenting the
working women upstairs, while two soldiers tromp through the surrounding forest
like characters in a Beckett play. It
might not sound like much of an existence, but most everyone seems to find it preferable
to the dreaded Gomorrah-like Big City.
Absolutely
not to be confused with Spencer Williams’ morality tale, Go Down Death is essentially Hell’s sketch comedy show, stringing
together macabre vignettes that share common characters and settings, but do
not form a very cohesive storyline. Sometimes
they work and sometimes they just peter out, like post-1990’s SNL sketches. At least, Schimberg maintains a thoroughly
and distinctly weird vibe nearly the whole way through, as if H.P. Lovecraft
took over as the show-runner for The Andy
Griffith Show. Unfortunately, he
eventually breaks from his carefully constructed universe with a disappointingly
flat bit of hipsterism.
Down is not the sort
of film that serves as a willing showcase for the talents of its cast. Instead of tapping into their deep emotional reserves,
they simply mold themselves to fit Schimberg’s creepy tableaux. Nevertheless, the quality of Rayvin Disla’s
work as Butler comes through all the murky stylization quite clearly. Sammy Mena also conveys the pathos of the
outsider in a rather bold performance as Rosenthal, one of the gamblers, who
has a rather complicated pseudo-romantic relationship with the club singer,
Milda. Although underwritten by conventional
film standards, she is one of the few apparently humane figures in this world,
played with a good measure of sensitivity by Simone Xi.
Wearing its love for its love for Tod Browning’s
Freaks on its sleeve, Down freely mixes horror and surreal
tragedy. Arguably, the key ingredient is Jimmy Lee Phelan’s timeless, otherworldly
black-and-white cinematography. Yet, when it finally seems to get somewhere,
viewers will wonder why it bothered. The
results are a wildly mixed bag—albeit one that is obviously the product of some
considerable combined talents.
Recommended for those who favor style over substance, Go Down Death screens tomorrow (8/5) at
the J.A. De Seve Theatre as part of this year’s Fantasia Festival. - jbspins.blogspot.com/
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