| It's as weird as it sounds... Harmony Korine offers up a nonsensical study of celebrity with Mister Lonely - and it works, to a point
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| Mister Lonely
Sept. 5-7, Cinematheque
One-time wunderkind Harmony Korine returns to screens after an eight-year absence to offer up his most accessible - if still thoroughly nonsensical - vision of a sub-section of society who would rather impersonate celebrities to enliven their mundane realities than deal with their own individual personalities. It's as ambiguous and ambitious as it sounds, a non-narrative comprised either of Korine's patented jokes-without-punchlines, or sentimental sketches between a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna, of Y tu mamá también) and a cadre of mimicked famous people.
'Michael Jackson,' residing in France but doing miserably financially despite having an agent, hears of an elusive place in the Scottish Highlands from 'Marilyn Monroe' (Samantha Morton) where everyone's famous and no one ages. He goes, partly he's developed feelings for Marilyn, but also due to aroused curiosity about a place where his outré persona is nothing out of the ordinary. Monroe's married to a crude Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), while other forged residents include an expletive-loving Abraham Lincoln, Sammy Davis, Jr., Madonna, The Three Stooges, and even the Pope and the Queen of England (James Fox and Anita Pallenberg, re-teaming from the counterculture cult classic Performance). Their time is spent cavorting around their shared castle, Korine relishing in the acknowledgement of certain familiar character traits for each celeb, before adding on another unfounded one.
On top of all of this is a mysterious subplot set in the Paraguayan jungle involving a missionary (director Werner Herzog) teaching nuns to fly. Herzog's spouted ideologies do seem to mesh well with the impersonator scenes, as everyone between the two set-ups seems to be evading their real lives or vocations through absurdist notions and escapist actions, but on the surface, nothing makes explicit sense. Which is probably what Korine intends.
Korine's craft has only elevated during his time away from the camera (if you minus a few short-subject video projects, this is his first full-fledged work since 1999's Julien Donkey-Boy), as the location work in both France and Scotland is phenomenally arresting. The faux famous people who dot the landscape make for a unique vision, reminding me of the sequence in Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 where people in a countryside villa have taken it upon themselves to memorize/become entire books, soon after literature has become outlawed.
It's compulsive viewing to be sure, with Korine injecting genuine emotion into his social misfits who are perfectly content to entertain each other in a third-act, old-fashioned 'putting-on-a-show' series of scenes. Korine invests so much, in fact, that it's a pity and a shame that beyond the original premise, there's not much more to go on. In our celebrity-saturated times, one would hope for something more incisive from Korine than the stated "lonely souls become look-alikes in order to fit in an improvised society."
— Aaron Graham |
Uptown
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