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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(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.
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).
(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.
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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.
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).
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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.
Carruth has, somewhat surprisingly, compared his film to Alan J Pakula’s All the President’s Men.