Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007)
Directed by Goran Dukić
Zia, distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, decides to end it all. Unfortunately, he discovers that there is no real ending, only a run-down afterlife that is strikingly similar to his old one, just a bit worse. Discovering that his ex-girlfriend has also "offed" herself, he sets out on a road trip to find her.
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12 films that influenced Wristcutters: A Love Story
What critics say influenced Wristcutters: A Love Story
But after the initial scene of suicide, it turns into an old-fashioned, on-the-road romantic comedy, reminiscent of It Happened One Night and The Sure Thing .
But after the initial scene of suicide, it turns into an old-fashioned, on-the-road romantic comedy, reminiscent of It Happened One Night and The Sure Thing .
The film follows Zia (Patrick Fugit from “White Oleander” and “Almost Famous”).
But the residents are irresistibly hip, beginning with Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous) as the title suicide, and not limited to Tom Waits as the crackpot leader of a utopian community utopian at least by suicide standards.
In the quiet opening shots of Goran Dukic's extremely dark comedy "Wristcutters: A Love Story," we watch a young man (Patrick Fugit, of "Almost Famous") cleaning his messy bedroom.
Though he still resembles his Almost Famous teenage persona, Patrick Fugit fills out the angst driven needs of Zia quite nicely.
The film opens on Zia (Patrick Fugit, still working the floppy hair he pioneered seven years ago in “Almost Famous”), heartbroken and suicidal after being dumped by his girlfriend, Desiree (Leslie Bibb).
Zia (Patrick Fugit, "Almost Famous," "Saved!") cannot get out of the funk he's in since breaking up with girlfriend Desiree (Leslie Bibb, "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby"), so he cleans his tiny apartment, then slits his wrists, then comes to to find himself in a dingier version of his place with a bossy Austrian roommate and a dead end job.
Like Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life, Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital and Christoffer Boe's Allegro , Wristcutters: A Love Story depicts limbo as a place of dreary banality occasionally touched by the transcendent - and despite working with a very low budget, newbie director Goran Dukic manages to find romance, pathos and wildly oddball humour in the drabbest of settings and bleakest of materials.
While the notion that suicide leads to a post-existence world of mindless bureaucratic doldrums has been done before (Beetlejuice more or less covered that topic), Dukic’s does offer up something that smacks of originality.
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Like Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life, Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital and Christoffer Boe's Allegro , Wristcutters: A Love Story depicts limbo as a place of dreary banality occasionally touched by the transcendent - and despite working with a very low budget, newbie director Goran Dukic manages to find romance, pathos and wildly oddball humour in the drabbest of settings and bleakest of materials.
Dukic tells the tale in a literally deadpan style road movie, resembling a George Romeo version of The Wizard of Oz , filtered through a sardonic sensibility; a quieter, gentler version of the Dylan song "Ain't Talkin'" or Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
In a roadtrip that plays like “The Wizard of Oz” rewritten by Jim Jarmusch and set along the endless desert of the I-15, Zia and Eugene encounter Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon), a determined and independent young woman who is convinced she’s been sent to this dimension by mistake and is seeking out “the people in charge” to see if she can straighten out the bureaucratic confusion.
In the supernatural mysteries Jacob's Ladder, The I Inside, Donnie Darko, Stay and Reeker, so close is limbo's resemblance to home that its occupants struggle to recognise they are even there.
Like Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life, Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital and Christoffer Boe's Allegro , Wristcutters: A Love Story depicts limbo as a place of dreary banality occasionally touched by the transcendent - and despite working with a very low budget, newbie director Goran Dukic manages to find romance, pathos and wildly oddball humour in the drabbest of settings and bleakest of materials.
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A road trip with an Eastern European in the driving seat and the music of Gogol Bordello playing on the stereo inevitably evokes Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated (and Eugene is based on that film's Ukrainian star, Eugene Hutz) - but in the end Wristcutters: A Love Story is, like the limbo it portrays, a peculiar hybrid of recognisable, second-hand elements that somehow add up to something entirely sui generis - an idiosyncratic piece of magical realism whose characters are literally on the road to nowhere.
This wretched addition to the cinema of magical realism (think: "Pan's Labyrinth" or "Everything is Illuminated") takes such an arch tone by tacitly endorsing suicide that it spends most of its time in narrative freefall.
Those seeking other compartments of the Great Hereafter must rely on movies such as What Dreams May Come and Corpse Bride, neither of which remotely resembles the low-budget alternative presented here by director Goran Dukic (who is adapting from the short story "Kneller's Happy Campers" by Etgar Keret).