Something
about Philip Glass’s Music with Changing
Parts brings to mind Torgo’s theme from Manos:
the Hands of Fate. That is not a criticism. In fact, it is another reason
why it works so well as the soundtrack to Quentin Dupieux’s latest mind-trip.
Reality with get twisted up and bent over double in Dupieux’s ironically titled
Reality (trailer here), which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center.
Her
name is “Reality” and her hunter father just bagged a wild boar. Nobody
believes her, but she knows she saw a blue VHS tape pop out of its stomach
while her Pops was removing the entrails. She will duly retrieve that tape, but
the director filming her story will take his sweet time before he lets watch
it. His name is Zog and he is driving his French producer Bob Marshall to
distraction with his cost-overruns. Marshall is the decisive type. He is fully
willing to fund Jason Tantra’s horror movie if he can produce the perfect groan
of misery to express its essence.
In
between his groan sessions, Tantra works his day job as a camera man for a
cooking hosted by a man in a rat costume suffering from phantom eczema. All
that scratching is starting to turn viewers against him. Frankly, the viewing
experience can be trying in Reality, as
when Tantra accidentally takes his wife to see his film before he starts making
it. Rather upset with the sound mix, he tries to stop the screening, so he can
fix it in the future. Then things start getting strange.
As
weird as Dupieux’s first act undeniably is, it is nothing compared to the
lunacy that follows. Dreams and films will interrupt and fold back into each
other, as each strange subplot doubles back and refers to itself. Edited by
Dupieux (a.k.a. Mr. Ozio), Reality has
an extremely complex structure mere mortals could not even begin to diagram.
Granted,
Reality lacks the warmth and
sweetness that made Wrong such an
unexpected pleasure, but it is still a blast to watch Dupieux juggle an
infinite number of balls in the air. Each new reverse is a thing of beauty onto
itself. It is easy for actors to get overwhelmed in such an auteurist
spectacle, but John Glover gives one for the ages as the supremely confident
Zog. Alain Chabat’s Tantra is like an everyman from an alternate universe (and
maybe he is), while Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon
Heder really looks like he is suffering from a nasty rash in that rat suit.
