The dystopian '80s get a good look in Panos Cosmatos' 'Beyond the Black Rainbow.'
Hundreds packed the Del Mar on Saturday night, April 14, for the Seventh Annual Secret Film Fest, a delectable 12-hour run of movies from around the world. Among the eclectic mix were Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, Morgan Spurlock’s surprisingly poignant documentary about the annual convention of comic book geeks, and The Raid: Redemption, an Indonesian martial arts thriller wherein a rookie cop must bust out of an apartment building full of underworld thugs after a special task force mission goes horribly awry. Here are a couple highlights from this year’s Secret Film Festival.
One of the most talked-about films this year was Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow(2010), a sci-fi/horror allegory set during the Reagan era. Shot in Kubrick-esque fashion, the film documents the struggle of Elena to escape from the Arboria Institute, a bizarre “commune” created in the 1960s that has since degenerated into a grotesque Kafkaesque nightmare world run by sadistic caretaker Dr. Barry Nyle.
In shooting the film, Cosmatos borrowed heavily from directors like David Lynch and the aforementioned Stanley Kubrick (even lifting the classic “Kubrick stare” near the end of the film) in order to lend it a sense of pervasive creepiness. Unfortunately, the highly allusive nature of the film proves to be more a distraction than an effective tool for building character and setting. Unlike his progenitors, Cosmatos fails to embed his characters in a believable world (think Frank Booth speeding around his hokey little town committing Blue Velvet–style atrocities right under the nose of hapless suburbanites) and thus leaves with only a hint of what could be a potentially great film. The good news is that the film is conceptually fascinating: we wonder how the utopian ’60s prefigured the dystopian ’80s, and we’re invited, through juxtaposition, to wonder whether the quotidian and utterly boring world of 1983 belies a menacingly evil core. Despite the uneven execution of the film, there is enough here to hope that Cosmatos’ art can grow from his debut.
A crowd favorite from Saturday/Sunday’s film marathon was the 2010 Swedish comedy-musicalSound of Noise. Amadeus Warnebring was born tone-deaf, a discomfiting position when your parents are legendary orchestral musicians and younger brother is a wunderkind composer-conductor. Predictably he eschews the musical lifestyle and instead takes a job as a detective in the fusty city of Malmö. There’s not much to do until musikterrorists Sanna and Magnus decide to drop their “musical bomb” on the unsuspecting residents of the city.
The film is, in essence, a caper film wherein our bohemian heroes must move surreptitiously through the city to perform Magnus’ futurist opus, a conceptual piece called Music for One City and Six Drummers, which calls for the use of ordinary city noises while avoiding their music-hating nemesis, Warnebring. As such the city becomes central to the development of the plot, and directors Ola Simonsson and Johannes Nilsson expertly render it as the site of antiquated values inhabited by blowhards and egoists. In one scene, for instance, Magnus and Sanna walk down the city streets as speakers—the sort one might imagine in present-day North Korea—blast out a tinny version of Haydn. The joke, of course, is that Malmö is under dictatorial control, not of the Great Leader but of the old and the boring. With such a great nemesis it’s no surprise that most of the laughs come at the expense of the old guard (the apex coming in the Third Movement with the defacement of the Malmö Opera House), but before anyone reads this as a radical film in the spirit of Russalo it should be noted that it is Warnebring who ultimately succeeds in getting what he wants. Far from destroying the city, the musical terrorists perform and then exit the stage, making their piece an apt analog for the film: a delightful delectation to be sure, but not much else.
