Who the hell is Oliver Stone?
Made after supposed frustration at having become a Hollywood hack with
The Underneath, (which was probably one of the best noirs in colour of
the recent decade), Soderbergh put around $300,000 of his own money into
a personal project. And like Barton Fink, which the Coens really did
write out of writer's block during Miller's Crossing, Schizopolis is a
genial look at reactive-depressive filmmaking. Let me start by saying
that is is the most honestly funny director's project I have seen since
Godard directed cars. The genius of Soderbergh is his consistency: he
knows how to develop an idea on the abstract and dramatic levels and
follow it through. Nothing is so second or third-rate as to be out of
place. And his humour is always central enough to further drive the main
flow and diversions of narrative. And ultimately, this is a film about
the machinations and limitations of narrative. Now, I can't remember any
other directors in recent history willing to attack this primal monster
of existence with such panache and humour. And someone willing to do
that in front of the camera.
The three numbered stories, each uniquely
introduced, are coded narratives dealing with language. The first
Soderbergh character is a lackey at the office of a Scientologist
business, frustrated and jaded, who fuses, simply by act of looking,
into a dentist much like himself, who is en route to the Number Two
attractive woman; and the third episode relates the perspective of the
former's wife who fuses into a similar woman with a train of Soderberghs
each with a differently dubbed accent. There's a small host of minor
characters and incidentals who bring much of the film's funniest texts
("Oliver Stone? Who's Oliver Stone?") and side shots at the moviemaking
art. Soderbergh One speaks in formal, typologic platitudes to his wife;
Elmo the bug man speaks an entriely different language code , where
strange word combinations replace standard cliched english -- though his
meaning is always the same: "jigsaw"- for example (used synonymously for
fuck, fucking and let's fuck). Everyone else speak in a variety of
limited codes: the dentist's jargon, the paranoid employee's, the
newspeak of the newscaster, the flim flam platitudinal psychologism of
the both the real psychologist, struggling with an unwilling camera
crew, and the 'Eventualism' Guru himself reading a speech by Soderbergh
One (which rephrases the toilet jargon of the former). So the text-codes
are contrapuntal to the cinema codes: the film's import, that we live in
narrative worlds and freely move between perspectives, is actually
successfully carried out in the drama of the characters, though much
humour and pisstaking lie between them. And that is genial, folks. It
means we have to keep our eye on this young maker. It is not only
imperative for a director to know what he is doing, with respect to the
script at hand and the film that Hollywood expects of him, but his free
or reactionary projects should be the portals of discovery.
I was amazed
at how appealing Soderberghs One and Two were on the screen: I mean he
acts better than Tarantino, but he has none of the sly winks or leg
pulls that other lesser talents pull out of the bag or their hair (Super
Globe-Trotters style) when piecing together a mosaic of cinema. He has
the almost bemused look of impartial confusion at the reactions of his
actors. It is all the more amazing that he can be so stylistically
consistent in presenting a world where nothing is real. Pacing,
underwriting, doubling up and redubbing, mocking and surprised, always
on the money. And let me tell you again, that after all notions of
documentary truth and photographic realism have finally beeen forgotten,
in the sciences as in the subjective arts, that the only value and
measure of truth is consistency. This is the true heart of style: making
a work stand up on its own because its internal clauses and codes are
consistent with another. If Eugs doesn't award this film the Palm Toto
for Festival Excellence, then he doesn't know art from chaff. I mean
this is one of those rare pieces that illustrate the workings of
cinematic boundaries, all made on a relative shoestring and yet so
candid. Soderbergh One addressing his neighbour: "Is your wife comin'
around later? Her big ass really satisfying". There were times I thought
of Gibson's personal exercise Video Fool for Love, but this was
infinitely better. A man came up to me at the end of the screening and
said "That was like a Seventies thing". I concurred, though I felt his
implication was for the American 70s, not the Continental decade. And
the unfortunate thing is, that Schizopolis is not and will not be widely
distributed and probably won't come to Australia again until one
festival or other realises the nature of genius and organises a
retrospective. And then they'll be waffling about their scoop, and how
rarely it's shown and how lucky they are to have the eminent film writer
and Soderbergh scholar so and so in the audience, and he too, like
myself, will boast of having seen the film in '99, in a great print with
its characteristic sound bumps. So, all thanks must go to the
Futureshock duo who brought this work to the festival. I urgently
counsel anyone who hasn't already done so to see this film. If I had
more time and disquisitional space I could ramble in more coherent
style, and maybe I could take a few questions from the patrons at the
end, with copies of my recent book for sale in every bloody Festival
cinema, but you will have to wait a few years. Otherwise, go back to the
hip panache of Out of Sight.
rino breebaart
comments? email the author
return to Sydney Film Festival 1999 index
read rino's write-up of ray carney's Cassavetes Retrospective
read rino's review of Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight