Braying at the Moon
Harmony
Korine shoots and almost scores with Julien Donkey-Boy
Harmony
Korine's directorial debut, Gummo, was like a hard smack to the face of
contemporary cinema. Relentlessly nonlinear, filled with disturbing imagery,
and impossible to synopsize, it caused many viewers to wince in pain, and
persuaded even more to walk quickly past its poster -- of a slightly misshapen
child's head -- while pretending they hadn't even noticed it to begin with.
Maybe they hoped that if they ignored Korine's initial carnival of freaks, he'd
just vanish into the background. Numerous critics certainly felt that way.
Those of us, however, who are so numbed by the same tedious film offerings year
in and year out that we enjoy the occasional slap to our senses know better.
Anyone dedicated enough to make a movie like Gummo in the first place would not
stop there.
Now Korine has returned with Julien
Donkey-Boy, this time under the auspices of the "Dogme 95"
manifesto put forward by Lars Von Trier, Thomas Vinterburg, and several others,
the gist of which is that handheld cameras must be used, nothing artificial may
be added (including props, costumes, lighting, and any postproduction effects),
and all sound must be recorded on set. It should be noted, however, that Korine
adheres to this philosophy about as liberally as Bill Clinton defines sex,
thereby giving his film the prestige of being a Dogme film without actually
doing anything much differently than he would otherwise have done. Special
effects such as slow motion and freeze-frame are used, but since these effects
are now built-in features on most digital cameras, it seems Korine technically
doesn't consider them special effects. Much of the music is far too clean to
have been recorded while shooting, but Korine almost certainly used a
technological excuse to get around this, too, jacking the sound in directly
from a CD player, for instance, while the camera was still rolling. (This would
make it technically okay, while still subverting the intent of the Dogme
tenets).
Dogmatic gimmickry aside,
however, it's pretty clear that Korine follows no rules but his own. The story,
inasmuch as one can be said to exist, follows Julien (Ewen Bremner), a
schizophrenic young man who lives in a New York suburb with his perverted
German father (the legendary Werner Herzog, acting like Mike Myers'
"Dieter"), a grandmother (Korine's real-life grandmother Joyce), a
brother who aspires to be a wrestler (Evan Neumann), and a sister whom he has
raped and impregnated (Chloe Sevigny). The movie stylistically mimics Julien's
disjointed perception of the world around him and is full of jump cuts, odd
angles, and overlapping sounds, all shot in grainy digital video, mostly with
an orangy tint. Julien spends his days working as an attendant in a school for
the blind (according to the press kit, anyway; the film is infuriatingly vague
on this point), and his nights are spent spouting off endless random dialogue
to no one in particular. Constantly berated by his drug-addicted father, Julien
finds solace in the friendship of his sister, who doesn't seem to begrudge him
the rape/incest thing, and an 11-year-old half-blind ice-skater (newcomer
Chrissy Kobylak). And that's it. There's not much more narrative apart from a
minor crisis at the end, and to give that away would be unfair, although it's
easy to see it coming.
As Julien, Ewen Bremner is
fantastic. Having already proven himself fearless in Trainspotting and The Acid
House, Bremner leaps so wholeheartedly into convincing schizophrenic mode that
most people won't even stop to admire his flawless American accent (his natural
dialect is near-incomprehensible Scottish). Complete with metal teeth and a mop
of vertical black hair, Bremner's Julien looks like a cross between Edward
Scissorhands and Bond villain Jaws, and elicits the same blend of sympathy and
fear that such a combination implies. Herzog, meanwhile, steals every scene
that he's in, whether he's remembering a talking bird from his youth or begging
his son to put on a dress and dance with him. And skater Chrissy Kobylak, whom
Korine discovered from watching Hard Copy, is a natural on camera. Even though
she's basically playing herself, it should be noted that she manages to keep a
straight face singing "I Feel Good" to Bremner while washing his
feet.
Visually, Korine revisits many
familiar Gummo motifs. There's a drummer with no arms, a man who swallows
cigarettes, another who takes a bath in dirty water, yet another who wrestles
with an inanimate object, and numerous extras with varying degrees of physical
or mental disability. It has been argued that Korine is mocking these people,
but Julien makes it more apparent that Korine is squarely in their camp, as the
film's intent is to let us see the world through the eyes of a schizophrenic.
It can be maddening sometimes (it would have been nice to have the school for
the blind identified as such even once), disturbing (Julien's sudden acts of
violence, including the rape scene), or even boring (long stretches of
stream-of-consciousness monologue). It certainly can't coast on novelty
weirdness, since Gummo has it handily beaten on that score, mainly because that
film's middle-of-nowhere disaster area was far less familiar cinematically than