Upstream Color (2013)
Directed by Shane Carruth
A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the lifecycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.
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36 films that influenced Upstream Color
What critics say influenced Upstream Color
(Another likely influence or parallel would be Richard Kelly, he of “Donnie Darko” and “Southland Tales.” ) You could read the film as the story of life on planet Earth, with some vague degree of mysticism but no default to spiritual or supernatural beginnings, or you could say (despite my claim earlier that human society is nearly invisible) that it’s a parable about life in a downward-trending economy.
For every viewer who fell in love with the wilfully mind-boggling Donnie Darko or The Fountain , there's another who gave up long before the end credits and posted an angry IMDb diatribe about their ordeal.
Maybe we’ll see the release of a Donnie Darko -style 'Director’s Cut’ down the track, purporting to filling in some of the gaps.
(Another likely influence or parallel would be Richard Kelly, he of “Donnie Darko” and “Southland Tales.” ) You could read the film as the story of life on planet Earth, with some vague degree of mysticism but no default to spiritual or supernatural beginnings, or you could say (despite my claim earlier that human society is nearly invisible) that it’s a parable about life in a downward-trending economy.
Here I was reminded of Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 feature O Lucky Man! but maybe that’s just me.
No one else today approaches the genre in quite this way; the only precedent I can think of is Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).
Like David Lynch’s seminal Eraserhead , the film that most often came to mind in my furious effort to somehow contextualize Upstream Color, Carruth’s film feels like a subconscious flow of fears and anxieties.
David Lynch is the best example: a filmmaker who has long made highly experimental shorts that then inform his (relatively) more accessible narrative work—and occasionally, as in the "Rabbits" sequence from his 2006 Inland Empire, uses those shorts within the long-form work.
David Lynch is the best example: a filmmaker who has long made highly experimental shorts that then inform his (relatively) more accessible narrative work—and occasionally, as in the "Rabbits" sequence from his 2006 Inland Empire, uses those shorts within the long-form work.
I’ve heard the film called ‘Lynchian’ in some quarters, and while Upstream Colour doesn’t come anywhere near the unflinching impenetrability of something like Inland Empire, the comparison is not entirely unwarranted.
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The notion that a film ought to or even can be "solved" in some meaningful sense, an enduring misconception of the function of criticism and typically a massive waste of one's intellectual resources, reached a zenith of fashionability in the early 2000s, as nominally labyrinthine dramas like Donnie Darko and Memento briefly captured the popular imagination by substituting sophomoric clue-scrounging for the process of actual thought.
Carruth portrays the couple's courtship in scenes so evocative they reach heights of cinematic lyricism rarely seen on film since Jean Cocteau's Orpheus (1950).
At a first glance, attempting synopsis is the wrong work to attempt, especially of its opening passages that suggest a science-fiction mysterium of physical dread and sonic paranoia (See under: Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) that finds a character called the Sampler in search of sounds in a muddy pig-lot filled with domesticated piglets as well as abductions that lead to samplings of bodies (and presumably souls).
He’s referring to Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder, a mediation on love and nature that arrives in Toronto theatres next week.
I don’t know what Carruth intended — and I’m not sure he does either — but “Upstream Color” gets into an area that feels very much like religion, and in a way that Terrence Malick’s similarly fragmentary and more heavy-handed “ To the Wonder ” tries to, and fails.
But it's uncanny that Terrence Malick 's "To the Wonder" should open today as well, because the thing Malick fails at doing -- creating a new kind of structure -- is exactly where Carruth succeeds, to an extraordinary and deeply affecting degree.
If anything, the film that Upstream Color most resembles isn’t Primer, but actually Malick’s latest film To the Wonder.
It's an interesting coincidence that the movie opens in Memphis the same day as Malick's " To the Wonder ": Both features are philosophical, elliptical and purely cinematic.
It would make a terrific double bill with Malick’s new “To the Wonder,” which is also a flawed, gorgeous and enigmatic love story.
But if you admire movies like Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, you'll almost certainly find value in this one, as well.
Sharing thematic similarities to 2011's critically uneven " The Tree of Life ," the film is less labored but more antiseptic, not as concerned with hazy religious iconography as it is with underlying biology and science.
Comparisons to Terrence Malick and "The Tree of Life," among other Malicks, have abounded ever since director-writer-co-star Shane Carruth's elliptical venture premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
You'll see shades of The Tree of Life's birth of the universe sequence in his breathtaking mico-photography of chemical reactions, and the cycle of natural world is clearly integral to Upstream.
Where the first half of Primer is full of rapid-fire dialogue with scientific jargon and heady astrophysics theories being ping-ponged back-and-forth like an episode of Gilmore Girls, Upstream Color is a 90-minute meditation on storytelling and the fragile nature of identity and human connection that feels like a feature-length version of the most abstract segments of Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
Upstream is overwhelming at times — it’s the only time outside of The Tree of Life’s creation sequence I’ve felt the urge to flee the theater out of sheer overload — but its numinous beauty endures.
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Carruth has, somewhat surprisingly, compared his film to Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men.
I meant those words as a kind of high praise: the remarkable Seimetz is as central to the film as women in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s late films, like Irène Jacob in “Three Colors: Red” and “The Double Life of Véronique” or Juliette Binoche in “Three Colors: Blue.”
I meant those words as a kind of high praise: the remarkable Seimetz is as central to the film as women in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s late films, like Irène Jacob in “Three Colors: Red” and “The Double Life of Véronique” or Juliette Binoche in “Three Colors: Blue.”
I meant those words as a kind of high praise: the remarkable Seimetz is as central to the film as women in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s late films, like Irène Jacob in “Three Colors: Red” and “The Double Life of Véronique” or Juliette Binoche in “Three Colors: Blue.”