Sing, sing a song, sing a happy song...
--what they sing in heaven when you're dead
I've been here for almost a week now, and seen I think fifteen movies. The boundaries between world and film are starting to get a little hazy. And I sit down in the "Bloor Hot Docs Cinema" (a very cool theater--balcony, big window between the last row of seats and the bar), and see this thing, and it doesn't help clarify matters any, the boundaries are even fuzzier than they were before. What the heck did I just watch?
The director's first reaction after reading the script: "What did I just read?"
Her second reaction: "This is so fucked up!"
Her reaction the next morning after sleeping on it: "That was so fucked up!"
Here's a picture:
Yes, that's right, there's a severed, talking head on his kitchen counter.
I know the movie was a comedy, because a lot of the audience was laughing. Which is a good thing for me, because I wasn't sure whether to laugh or not, and I was probably too busy having my fuses blown to laugh anyway. It's an odd kind of comedy though. I wasn't getting any of the cues I'm normally used to to laugh. And I don't mean a laugh track, I mean the chaotic climax of a Laurel and Hardy scene, or a befuddled look from Bob Newhart, or the ba-da-boom punchline from the last in a series of hilarious David Foster Wallace footnotes, but there weren't any comedic moments or comedic timing stuff going on here, I'm still not completely sure what to make of it. Now, no one likes a good laugh more than I do...
The Voices is about a guy working in a toilet factory in a bum-fuck-nowhere town in the Midwest. He doesn't seem quite right. He talks to his dog and cat, and they talk back to him. He's seeing a therapist who gets him to admit he's avoiding his meds, thanks him for his honesty, but reminds him that they have a deal with state correctional facility and if he keeps avoiding his meds then he's going back in the slammer. Things eventually get very crazy, in an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind kind of way, and it's either horrifying or it's hilarious or it's both in some kind of crazy way. It's definitely not a comment on mental illness, both the directory and the writer were firm about that--it's about entertaining the audience.
Great anecdote: Marjane Satrapi, the director, described the perils of filming with a real cat as you'd expect. The dog, you tell it to sit and it sits. The cat, you tell it to do something and it wanders off in the other direction. Her editor was also the second unit director. They'd set up the shot and leave for the night, and the second unit director would sit there for hours going "here, kitty, kitty" until the cat spent a couple seconds in the place where they wanted it.
Ryan Renolds is one of those guys who's been in tons of movies, instantly recognizable but completely unnamable. She cast him after seeing him in The Green Lantern. "Anybody who could do such a good job in such a shitty movie..." she said.
Satrapi says she was a painter before she was a director. It shows in her really effective use of color pallettes. Most of the film is in bright colors and primary tones (they wear pink jumpsuits in the toilet factory where they work). After we find out he's crazy, bat-shit crazy, and isn't taking his medication. The talking head (see above) yells at him to "Take the damn pills!" and cows him into doing it, and then we see the world as it really is, not through the colored glasses of his craziness, and it's not primary colors and sunshine any more, and you can actually smell it, it's not pretty.
There is no trailer for this movie, it's too new.
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