Before
going largely unnoticed during its extremely limited theatrical release last
August, Songs From the Second Floor was a Jury Prize-winner at Cannes
in 2000 and an invitee to Roger Ebert’s 2001 Overlooked Film Festival. Floor
took Swedish writer/director Roy Andersson four years to complete. (And
you thought you waited a long time for Stanley Kubrick to finish Eyes Wide Shut.)
Dark, surreal, depressing, bleak,
and based on a poem by Peruvian Communist Caesar Vallejo, Floor is made up of 46 scenes. Some are steeped in Swedish
folklore, others in religion, and most damn the current state of our modern
capitalist society.
The stories are not all related to
one another, though each is set in the same nameless Scandinavian city during
what I can only imagine is supposed to be either the eve of the Apocalypse or
the end of the Millennium. (Remember Y2K? It was still a real threat back when
Andersson came up with the story.)
The main character is Kalle (Lars
Nordh), who, as the film opens, has just burned down his own furniture store
and spends the following scenes repenting in dust and ashes, like Job. Some of
Kalle’s many, many problems include being haunted by two ghosts and by his son,
a cab-driving poet now living in a mental hospital.
There are other stories, and they’re
just as deliciously odd. One looks like it could have been an outtake from the
Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy,
while another features a pile of crucifixes at the local dump. There’s even a
spot in which a group of subway fares break out into a sing-along opera, a la
the “Wise Up” scene from Magnolia.
Toss in the child sacrifice and the
parade of slow-moving marchers who flagellate themselves as they weave their
way through the traffic jam that has lasted for several days, and you’ve got a
pretty good idea of how unconventional Floor is. It’s Samuel Beckett meets Monty Python. Parts of it seem like they were
lifted from Terry Gilliam’s subconscious, pressed through Kafka’s meat grinder
and into Buñuel’s casings.
And that’s just the plot. Think the
images in Road To Perdition were carefully
constructed? These will knock your socks off, while filling your heart with
dread and despair. Floor is (mostly)
populated by very unattractive first-time actors who are either deathly thin or
morbidly obese, but each is pasty enough to make 2002 Michael Jackson look like
1978 Michael Jackson.
Andersson, who also produces and
edits, moves his camera exactly once during the entire film (he might be
gun-shy, as this is only his fourth film since A Swedish Love Story won four trophies at the 1970 Berlin Fest).
You may be asking, “What about the music?” It’s composed by ABBA’s
Benny Andersson. ‘Nuff said.
Floor is probably the kind of film most viewers won’t “get” (I know I
didn’t) but is so enjoyably unusual that following the plot seems unimportant
(another recent example of this would be Mulholland
Drive). For me, any movie in which a character loudly wonders, “How
can you make money with a crucified loser?” when prodded into a career of
selling Jesus effigies is one hell of a cinematic experience. Floor will be screened on Saturday,
August 3 at the Dryden Theatre.
Henry Bean’s impressive directorial
debut, The Believer, opens with a scene showing its conflicted central
character trailing a young man and then pummeling the snot out of him, simply
because he’s wearing a yarmulke.
The protagonist, if you feel
comfortable calling him that, is 26-year-old Danny Balint (Murder 8y Num8ers‘ Ryan Gosling), an extremely well-spoken and
seemingly well-educated skinhead extremist who appears much brighter than the
goofy Nazis he chooses to call friends. Danny, who says the things that he
believes everyone else is secretly thinking, hates Jews for very specific
reasons, while his cohorts furrow their inbred brows when asked who Eichmann
was.
Hating
Jews is all Danny ever thinks about, which must be kind of like a latent
homosexual yammering non-stop about hating gays (a frat-house epidemic, it
seems), because, as it turns out, Danny is (or was) an Orthodox Jew.
We see, through flashbacks, a young,
exceedingly nerdy Danny being tossed out of Hebrew school, thanks to his
constant questioning of God’s authority (calling the Big G a “power-drunk
madman” and a “conceited bully”). His unanswered queries have
evolved into rage and hatred toward this particular organized religion, and the
only lesson he seems to have culled from years of yeshiva studies is that Jews
are inherently weak. After all, he reasons, who else would blindly agree to
sacrifice a son, like Abraham, or stand by meekly while Nazis execute the
person standing next to them?
When Danny falls in with Lina
Moebius (Theresa Russell) and Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane), the leaders of an
upstart underground fascist movement with big plans, he finds himself drawn
closer and closer to his religious roots, kicking off an intense inner battle
that grows more intense as his anti-Semitic activities become increasingly
militant.
Of course, nobody understands why
Danny knows so much about the enemy. They just assume he’s really smart and
hope to exploit his knowledge to raise money on the Nazi lecture circuit.
In addition to the inner turmoil,
Danny also begins a bizarre masochistic relationship (read: mad Aryan love)
with Lina’s daughter Carla (Summer Phoenix), re-connects with one of his former
yeshiva classmates, and becomes the interview subject of a newspaper reporter
who has somehow pieced together Danny’s religious background and may expose it
in a piece he’s writing. The Believer,
co-scripted by Bean (who has penned shlock like Deep Cover and Internal
Affairs) and Mark Jacobson, was partly inspired by the story of Daniel
Burros, a Nazi and self-hating Jew who ran into trouble when the New York Times outed him back in the
’60s.
Plenty of folks are going to compare
The Believer to American History X. It’s not quite as good, though Gosling (a
former Mickey Mouse Clubber along with Britney and Justin) nearly matches the
frightening fury of Ed Norton’s eerie performance in that film. There is also
likely to be a big chunk of people who dug X but will dislike this picture because there is no final-reel redemption to tie
everything up into a neat little package that makes you feel better on the way
home from the theater.
In addition to Gosling’s mesmerizing
performance (which won’t be eligible for the Academy Awards because The Believer debuted on pay cable before
beginning its theatrical run), Jim Denault’s (Our Song) handheld camera work is quite impressive.
The
Believer won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2001 and was pegged for a
cable premiere on September 30, 2001, but was subsequently pushed back after
the 9/11 attacks. (I saw it at the Toronto International Film Festival on
September 10, and it did seem a bit less upsetting back then).
Since then, the film has snagged a
European Film Award nomination and four Independent Spirit Awards — two for
Bean (Best Screenplay and Best First Feature) and one each for Gosling and
Phoenix. Without question, The Believer is a thought-provoking film that will spur discussion and, in some cases,
argument. But it’s a film that shouldn’t be missed, whatever your religious
beliefs may be. The Believer opens
Friday, August 2 at the Little Theatre.
‘Songs from the Second Floor,’ 5 and 8 p.m. Saturday, August 3 at
the Dryden Theatre, George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue. $5.50; $4.50 members
and students. ‘The Believer’ opens Friday at the Little Theatre, 240 East
Avenue. For more of Jon’s movie ramblings, visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy
www.sick-boy.com, or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2002.
