Boston Underground Film Festival: IT CAME FROM KUCHAR (2009) and AMER (2009)
Thursday, April 1, 2010 at the Landmark Kendall Sq. Cinema, Cambridge, MA.
IT CAME FROM KUCHAR Directed by Jennifer M. Kroot, featuring George & Mike Kuchar, Atom Egoyan, Buck Henry and John Waters.
Before I saw this film, my only awareness of George and Mike Kuchar came from John Waters’ performance film THIS FILTHY WORLD, wherein he recalls his admiration for their films and their fast-n-loose shooting style. Jennifer M. Kroot’s documentary works both as a study of several different schools of film-making in the past 50 years and as a biography of two relentlessly creative twin brothers. If you are interested in intimate films about family relationships and/or unusual and engaging (read: kooky) personalities, you will be fascinated by these two Bronx-born lads. If you are interested in:
- Madison Ave advertising/industrial filmmaking and illustration
- Beatnik-era experimental short films
- Sirkian melodrama
- countercultural/psychedelic films and comicbooks
- drive-in horror and sci-fi movies
- gay films that made the rest of the U.S. aware of The Castro
- student films from “the film-school generation” to the present –
the Kuchars have tried their hand at all of them and more!
The requisite interviews are informative and enlightening, though the highlight is Buck Henry, whom we see hanging out with George rather than talking about him. The most fun and involving sequences follow George as he teaches film students at the San Francisco Art Institute. Kroot enables you to be a fly on the wall in the sort of chaotic go-for-broke class setting that will either make you yearn to go to film school, or be very glad that you chose to be an accountant.
AMER Written & Directed by Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani, starring Marie Bos, Charlotte Eugene-Guibbaud, Delphine Brual, Bianca Maria D’Amato and Cassandra Foret.
Allow me to offer you a variation on the *Spoiler Alert* regarding AMER. I will not ruin the end, or any other surprises, but it is best that I warn you what state of mind you will need to enjoy this film. Had I seen it in the wrong mood, I expect I could have been bored or annoyed with it, or even found it pretentious. However, as this was a film festival, I came to it with as open a mind as I could manage. I made a conscious effort to connect with what these two directors were trying to share with me. In return I asked for something unexpected and unique. I was happily rewarded.
The paper-thin story focuses on three stages in the sexual awakening of a woman named Ana. We meet Ana first as a child of about 12 in a gothic mansion, then an adolescent on the Mediterranean coast, and finally as an adult returning to a dilapidated husk that had been her childhood home. Rather than expository dialogue, AMER focuses on Ana’s sensual memories, like the sound of a pocket watch chain and the stifling heat in a car with the windows up. The saturated sound design often threatens to become tedious; it is thankfully interrupted by a score of Ennio Morricone and other Italian exploitation maestros (lifted mostly from 1970′s films), in case you missed from the color and shadow drenched imagery that AMER is a valentine to Giallo.
AMER plays out as sort of an anthology film directed by a team whose previous films have all been shorts. The story might be more compelling if it were 15-20 minutes shorter, but as an overall experience, AMER is a sumptuously haunting 90 minutes.