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Drive-By Review: Spring
Jun. 5th, 2015 09:49 amWwwwoooowww, it's been quite a while. Possibly two whole weeks. I wish I could say I've been doing fascinating shit, but that would be lying. Oh, okay, not really, but...some of it I can't talk about for professional reasons, and other parts of it I have no particular impulse to talk about. So.
Yesterday, before catching up with the third season premiere of Hannibal (amazing, as ever), I walked up to HMV to pick up a copy of Spring that they'd set aside for me. This is an indie horror movie I'd seen trailers for and been interested by--the promo material promises a mixture of love story and monster movie, and while that is certainly true, the execution is far smarter, more subtle and more interesting than you expect it to be.
Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci)'s dad died of a sudden heart attack just before his mom was diagnosed with cancer; he had to drop out of university and come home to look after her, working in the local bar as a sous chef. The day she dies he goes out drinking with a friend and ends up punching out an aggressive tweaker, necessitating a quick relocation. Do he takes his inheritance and goes to Italy, where his dad was always talking about going. He ends up in a small town near Pompeii, where he meets the beautiful and mysterious Louise (Nadia Hilker), a scientist studying evolutionary genetics. They're immediately attracted to each other and hook up; he offers to use a condom, but she won't let him. And after he's gone to sleep, when she wakes up to find the skin on her hands and face sizzling like bacon, she slips outside naked and eats a cat.
So yeah, Louise has her problems, and is frankly using Evan for a very specific purpose. But she doesn't want to hurt him, and as he falls quickly but deeply in love with her, she contemplates doing what she apparently hasn't done in (she eventually admits) over two thousand years: actually explaining what the last two decades of science have taught her about her own weird biology.
I hesitate to say much more, because part of the pleasure of Spring is letting it all unfold and go in pleasantly surprising directions. But one of the things I like most about the movie is how Louise is genuinely the kind of person two thousand years worth of inquiry is likely to produce--the kind who doesn't believe in witches or gods because she's been called both, who's had to accept that she's dangerous to be around at certain points but knows that's not going to make her any more immune to pain or fear than any other human being, who's open to as much pleasure as life affords her but beginning to believe she may never love any finite person enough to want to become finite along with them, or if that's even possible. Oh, and Evan's pretty great too, shallow and deep at the same time, but I've seen him before. I've rarely been allowed to see her, the unchanging Protean. The secular goddess.
For example: Louise's interest in science makes total sense contextually, but apparently, this dissecting impulse has been with her for the full haul; even back in Ancient Rome, she must have been the sort of kid who looked at a rainbow and said hmmm, can't help but notice the same thing happens when sea-spray lingers in the air; is that caused by the gods too, or is it more about light going through water-droplets and...what would you call that? (Centuries later) Refraction! I knew it! I mean, sure, you might get distracted by other people's responses to you for a while because magical thinking is definitely catching (that's how religious memes spread), but I think part of Louise's firm belief that nothing about her situation is supernatural comes out of it being rooted in her own body, of having literally been inside it all this time; much like childbirth, the only way you can think these processes are unnatural is if you've spent your whole life separate from actual nature, because if you grow up near livestock then simple observation will give the lie to most preconceptions about how babies are made.
Then again, she does say she was always interested in scientific inquiry, so I'm sure she was doing little experiments with grafting and breeding even before the mountain erupted. Depending on her level of education and position in society, she might have been a fan of Hypatia, or even known about Pliny the Elder living nearby. If not, she must have felt pretty disappointed to realize she could have been his teenaged stalker, later on.
At any rate: great film, really smart, but also funny and moving. And physically very beautiful/eerie, too, which is my favourite combination. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who get directorial credit, are also the screenwriter (benson), cinematographer (Moorhead) and co-editors, so it has a unity of vision I find extremely compelling. Here's hoping they can continue to collaborate, and find some level of funding where they can do larger films without losing their sense of adventure and joy. Though casting more than one female character per movie would also be an awesome goal, even if Louise is so damn amazing.
Yesterday, before catching up with the third season premiere of Hannibal (amazing, as ever), I walked up to HMV to pick up a copy of Spring that they'd set aside for me. This is an indie horror movie I'd seen trailers for and been interested by--the promo material promises a mixture of love story and monster movie, and while that is certainly true, the execution is far smarter, more subtle and more interesting than you expect it to be.
Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci)'s dad died of a sudden heart attack just before his mom was diagnosed with cancer; he had to drop out of university and come home to look after her, working in the local bar as a sous chef. The day she dies he goes out drinking with a friend and ends up punching out an aggressive tweaker, necessitating a quick relocation. Do he takes his inheritance and goes to Italy, where his dad was always talking about going. He ends up in a small town near Pompeii, where he meets the beautiful and mysterious Louise (Nadia Hilker), a scientist studying evolutionary genetics. They're immediately attracted to each other and hook up; he offers to use a condom, but she won't let him. And after he's gone to sleep, when she wakes up to find the skin on her hands and face sizzling like bacon, she slips outside naked and eats a cat.
So yeah, Louise has her problems, and is frankly using Evan for a very specific purpose. But she doesn't want to hurt him, and as he falls quickly but deeply in love with her, she contemplates doing what she apparently hasn't done in (she eventually admits) over two thousand years: actually explaining what the last two decades of science have taught her about her own weird biology.
I hesitate to say much more, because part of the pleasure of Spring is letting it all unfold and go in pleasantly surprising directions. But one of the things I like most about the movie is how Louise is genuinely the kind of person two thousand years worth of inquiry is likely to produce--the kind who doesn't believe in witches or gods because she's been called both, who's had to accept that she's dangerous to be around at certain points but knows that's not going to make her any more immune to pain or fear than any other human being, who's open to as much pleasure as life affords her but beginning to believe she may never love any finite person enough to want to become finite along with them, or if that's even possible. Oh, and Evan's pretty great too, shallow and deep at the same time, but I've seen him before. I've rarely been allowed to see her, the unchanging Protean. The secular goddess.
For example: Louise's interest in science makes total sense contextually, but apparently, this dissecting impulse has been with her for the full haul; even back in Ancient Rome, she must have been the sort of kid who looked at a rainbow and said hmmm, can't help but notice the same thing happens when sea-spray lingers in the air; is that caused by the gods too, or is it more about light going through water-droplets and...what would you call that? (Centuries later) Refraction! I knew it! I mean, sure, you might get distracted by other people's responses to you for a while because magical thinking is definitely catching (that's how religious memes spread), but I think part of Louise's firm belief that nothing about her situation is supernatural comes out of it being rooted in her own body, of having literally been inside it all this time; much like childbirth, the only way you can think these processes are unnatural is if you've spent your whole life separate from actual nature, because if you grow up near livestock then simple observation will give the lie to most preconceptions about how babies are made.
Then again, she does say she was always interested in scientific inquiry, so I'm sure she was doing little experiments with grafting and breeding even before the mountain erupted. Depending on her level of education and position in society, she might have been a fan of Hypatia, or even known about Pliny the Elder living nearby. If not, she must have felt pretty disappointed to realize she could have been his teenaged stalker, later on.
At any rate: great film, really smart, but also funny and moving. And physically very beautiful/eerie, too, which is my favourite combination. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who get directorial credit, are also the screenwriter (benson), cinematographer (Moorhead) and co-editors, so it has a unity of vision I find extremely compelling. Here's hoping they can continue to collaborate, and find some level of funding where they can do larger films without losing their sense of adventure and joy. Though casting more than one female character per movie would also be an awesome goal, even if Louise is so damn amazing.
