In addition to screening two feature films, the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series ‘Friends With Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers’ includes a baker’s dozen of short films divided into four Short Programs. To find out more about the series visit the ‘Friends With Benefits’ website.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has made filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes its focus for the shorts programs in the ‘Friend With Benefits’ series. Of the 13 films on the slate, divided across four programs, Abrantes directs or co-directs all but one (he also wrote all of them and appears in most), and the collection represents nearly his entire body of work. Seeing them as a collective over a short period of time makes two things abundantly clear about the auteur.

His fearlessness and his unwillingness to be contained by any specific set of creative guidelines are undeniable. His topics include Shakespearean works and the war in Iraq; the themes he tackles include incest, race relations, and global warming; and the storytelling styles he employs range from an ancient Greek comedy set in present-day Haiti to the exploration of a young man’s psyche by way of reality TV. Each of his films is as unique as those before it and after.

However, the fearlessness on the one side of the Abrantes coin shares an arrogance on the other. The filmmaker’s quest to display his intellectual superiority and prove his work is capital-A art comes with a cost: most of his films are difficult to consume and at times can be patience-testing. His topics, while intellectual, are dense, and his filmmaking style, rather than compensating for his dry material, instead complements it (at best) or compounds it (at worst). This is most evident in his scripts and how he directs his actors to deliver their lines. His dialogue is often vague or veiled, with long pauses between and throughout, and lines are routinely delivered in bored, listless monotones devoid of emotion.

Abrante’s performers—himself included—don’t act their parts so much as they deliver his message, and he has them do so in a way that their delivery of that message won’t upstage the message itself. This requires—almost demands—the viewer to have existing knowledge of the subjects he tackles so as to best understand the message he’s sending.

Program 1: Dreams, Drones, and Dactyls

This program contains three of Abrantes’s most recent works.  They are the most humorous of his films and, collectively, the most accessible to a wider audience.

Taprobana

Portugal’s greatest poet, Luís Vaz de Camões is the subject of this 16th-century comedy. The poet lives a life on the lam from Portuguese authorities with his lover, Dinamene. The two engage in extreme drug-fueled hedonism (coprophilia alert) until he is captured. At the end of his life, he finds himself somewhere between heaven and hell, with the choice available of where he would like to finally reside. The hallucination of Petrarch is the highlight here.

Freud and Friends

About as close to mainstream comedy as the filmmaker gets, Abrantes stars as a man who is the test subject of a scientific breakthrough that allows people’s dreams to be seen on TV. When his scientist girlfriend sees that he dreams of her sister and that he envisions his own mother emanating from a fart, paradise finds trouble. Abrantes fully commits to his reality TV approach to the film, keeping it at 30 minutes and including two very funny commercials.

Ennui Ennui

This near-screwball comedy focuses on a representative from France attempting to negotiate disarmament with an Afghani warlord. Through a well-structured series of events, the rep’s daughter, who is along for the trip, is mistaken for the warlord’s daughter and captured. Also, President Obama carries on father/daughter-like conversations with a drone flying over Afghanistan.

Program 2: Slow Learners

Five of Abrantes’s earliest works, mostly with collaborators, are collected here. It’s interesting to see how his production values have improved as he has achieved greater critical success, and yet his creative weaknesses have not.

Olympia I & II

Both co-written with and co-starring Katie Widloski, Abrantes’s first two films (presented here as one film in two parts) draw inspiration from and breathes life into Manet’s painting “Olympia.” In the first part, Widloski is the supple courtesan who is the object of her offscreen brother’s desire. The second part bends genders and challenges race as it makes Abrantes the subject and Widloski as the maid, albeit in overt blackface. These two films set the stage for what will be recurring themes and appearances of incest, race, and nudity throughout Abrantes’s oeuvre.

Visionary Iraq

This early entry was co-written with, co-directed by, and co-stars Fort Buchanan‘s Benjamin Crotty, who plays one-half of a pair of siblings readying to depart for the Iraq war. Playing his adopted Angolan sister is Abrantes, in heavy brown face. The siblings (yes, who are sleeping with each other) learn shortly before they deploy that their father is profiting from the war. While in Iraq, the siblings are faced with a moral dilemma.

Too Many Daddies, Mommies, and Babies

After failing to save the Amazon from ultimate ruin, a pair scientists in a same-sex relationship decide to return home and start a family using the egg of one of the scientist’s sisters and the uterus of a surrogate mother. This is an interesting look at the effects of man on nature, and how nature still has all of the power.

Liberdade

Opening with a young man stealing Viagra at gunpoint in an Angolan pharmacy, this sweeping story of love, crime, and racial tension, ultimately told in flashback from co-writers/directors Abrantes and Crotty, is one of the most “Hollywood” things the auteur has done, and it showcases his broader creative potential. The filmmakers also make great use of a slowed-down version of Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” (featuring Ladysmith Black Mambazo), as well as Frank Sinatra’s “Very Good Year.” This is a must-see.

Baby Back Costa Rica

More music video than short film, this 5-minute effort, which would have played better alongside Palaces of Pity (in Program 3), features three teen girls on a ride home to their awaiting swimming pool. During the ride, they discuss, among other things, pizza and Judaism.

Program 3: Friends for Eternity

Only two films are part of this Program, but they make up over 80 minutes of runtime and spotlight the first two collaborations between Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt (The Unity of All Things).

Palaces of Pity (Palacios de Pena)

This coming-of-age story focuses on two present-day teen girls—cousins who are being played against each other by their wealthy, dying grandmother. The matriarch will give her fortune to only one of the girls. When she passes away, legalities create a situation where one of the girls must voluntarily renounce her claim to the fortune…or involuntarily do so (at the hands of the other, of course). At 58 minutes, it has all the trappings of a full-length feature but is encumbered by the filmmakers’ indulgence to inject a 13-minute dream sequence set in medieval times.

A History of Mutual Respect

Abrantes and Schmidt costar as friends on a rainforest journey. Schmidt is in pursuit of clean, pure sex, while Abrantes is waiting for the right person. When the object of both their desires appears, their friendship is (eventually) forever changed. This film opens with lingering shots of a waterfall accompanied by the recorded wisdom of Nina Simone.

Program 4: Three Adaptations

This collection of shorts have ties to long-ago days.

The Island is Enchanted with You (La Isla está Encantada con Ustedes)

This opening short of the final program, and the only one that doesn’t feature work by Abrantes, comes from Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt, the filmmaking duo behind The Unity of All Things. Instead of science, though, this film delves into history; specifically, it looks at the history of Puerto Rico. Flirting with timelines ranging from present day to pre-Colonial days, and employing a variety of filmmaking elements (the island pulses with light when it talks, years on the timeline are represented by miniature headless CGI people, there’s a full music video at one point), this is a clever and captivating short where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ornithes (Zwazo)

Returning to Abrantes, this short transplants Aristophanes’ 414BC play The Birds into modern-day Haiti. With dialogue spoken in Haitian Creole and Attic Greek, the film features colorful costuming and the wonderful line, as uttered by a local driving a car following a bird riding a horse (while the backing track to the remix of L’il Wayne’s 6 Foot 7 Foot beats in the background), “My problem is that the director thinks we can still have a Dionysian collective trance induced by polyphonic hexameters or comic dactyls in Attic Greek. It’s plain foolish.”

Fratelli

The final short of the final program, co-written and co-directed by Abrantes and Alexandre Melo, is a retelling of the prologue of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. This isn’t the only connection to classic literature found here, though. Using some original costumes used in the 1972 film The Canterbury Tales, the filmmakers give an artistic nod to both Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Joel Hodgson, creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, once said in an interview about the show’s humor that the right people will get the joke.  His message was that while not everyone will understand everything, there will always be someone who will understand something. Such is the case of the works of Gabriel Abrantes—not every film will be for everyone, but each film will be for someone.

Fort Buchanan will screen in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series ‘Friends With Benefits: An Anthology of Four New American Filmmakers.’  To find out more about the series visit the ‘Friends With Benefits’ website.

While I’ve never served in the military (and thus have never been deployed), my family’s history has loads of this experience. While I often think about the grandparents and uncles and in-laws who have served, I rarely consider that while they were gone, they were forced to leave people behind—people who had to tackle childrearing as de facto single parents, as well as managing their own loneliness. In Fort Buchanan, writer/director Benjamin Crotty focuses on a group of military spouses and how they cope with childrearing and loneliness. However, the first-time filmmaker does so in the most peculiar of ways.

When his husband is deployed to Djibouti, Roger Sherwood (Andy Gillet) finds himself left alone to raise their 18-year-old adopted daughter Roxy (Iliana Zabeth). The two live on-base at Fort Buchanan, where they befriend a collection of other military wives whose husbands have also been deployed. As time passes, Roger finds himself increasingly distraught by loneliness, frustrated by his own weakness, and vexed by his blossoming daughter’s growing rebelliousness. That Roxy has become the object of desire of the lonely wives who are helping to raise her escapes Roger entirely, and efforts to address the emotional distance that comes with the geographic separation between Roger and his husband only make matters worse.

There’s something quite hypnotic about Fort Buchanan, a lean 65-minute feature that’s an expansion of Crotty’s 13-minute short film Fort Buchanan: Hiver. The film’s titular military base setting is quite perfect for the story, allowing for spouses to be believably absent while creating a space where Roger’s pangs of loneliness can coexist with the raging libido of a collective of horny housewives. That said, it’s really a base in name only; nothing about the setting says “military base” apart from the sign out front, and the setting feels more like a secluded resort deep in the Pocono woods, complete with something of a strapping and handsome farmhand/groundskeeper. It’s at this base/resort where the denizens spend their days lounging about without worry, discussing, among other things, the nicknames they have for their private parts.

This conversation actually happens, and it’s an emblem of the open sexuality that flows throughout the film. These wives, apart from their husbands for an unknown length of time, are allowed to go on “playdates” while their husbands are away. Once they clearly define their meaning of the word for Roger (he hears “playdate” and thinks back to when Roxy was a little girl), the playdates are revealed to be (mostly) of the sapphic variety. It’s here where a subplot begins about a friendly competition among the women to see who can bed the nubile, barely-legal Roxy first. This openness of sexuality, combined with cinematographer Michaël Capron’s lush 16mm lens and Ragnar Árni Ágústsson’s era-reminiscent score, gives this slice of the film’s narrative a very ’70s European cinema feel, invoking memories of films about sexual awakening like Just Jaekin’s Emmanuelle (1974).

All of this goes on right in front of Roger, whose physical and emotional detachment from his husband, coupled with his frustration at Roxy’s age-appropriate defiance, makes him mostly oblivious to it. In the film’s second act, Roger is determined to make some kind of connection with his husband, Frank (David Baiot), so he travels, unannounced, to Djibouti. Everyone else (Roxy and the wives) goes with him, as if on a vacation away from their vacation. They lounge in the heat of the African Republic’s climes (lending again to the idea that the military aspect of the film is for narrative convenience only) while Roger changes his appearance in an effort to mend his fractured marriage. While there, Roxy makes a heterosexual connection.

Not to be limited to tales of heartache and carnal pleasures, Crotty infuses a humor in Fort Buchanan that is something akin to slapstick. Moments of physical comedy occur when least expected, at times happening in the background while a more serious moment happens in the foreground. These tonal shifts might not do their specific scenes any particular favors, but they are genuinely funny, and make considering the film as a greater whole a slightly different exercise.

The third act falters with the introduction of a new character who appears to have been added so Crotty can take the film down a darker path. I like the idea in general, and the ending fits with the film’s subtle theme of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but with only a 65-minute runtime, the character would have been better served being introduced and developed earlier. Still, the third act is a stunner on its own.

Fort Buchanan is a terrific first feature and with it, Crotty proves he is fearless in the face of defying conventional filmmaking. The film, while not perfect, is in that sweet spot of being both enjoyable on its own and an indicator of the kind of talent Crotty has. Given time to hone his skills and focus his creative efforts, Benjamin Crotty could be around for a long time.

The purpose of the New Directors/New Films festival is to profile exciting new works by emerging talent across the world, a perfect description for Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan. Crotty, an American artist based in Paris, crafts a film that’s the sign of something fresh and distinct. Taking place on a French army base, Fort Buchanan follows Roger (Andy Gillet) as he stays behind while his soldier husband Frank (David Baiot) goes to work in Djibouti. Roger has little to do at the fort, aside from interacting with his abusive teenage daughter Roxy and the army wives waiting for their husbands to return.

In just over an hour, Crotty creates his own bizarre little world with Fort Buchanan. The fort itself is an area of sexual frustration, with the women eager to sleep with anyone they can find on the fort (including each other). Crotty also imbues his film with an off-kilter tone and sense of humour defying almost all conventions. There’s a sense of complete sincerity for every character, but Crotty regularly veers off into the realm of slapstick and surrealism. It’s a strange clash that feels like a direct mash-up between French arthouse and American indie.

Crotty’s balancing act doesn’t always work out in his favour, like when he tries shifting the narrative to a new character in the final act. But when it does work the results are hilarious and truly singular, a mishmash of styles and genres that work effortlessly. Fort Buchanan is the kind of debut that should get people excited; it’s original, strange, flawed, and brimming with potential. Most films have a hard time being this entertaining in two hours; Crotty does that and more in less than 65 minutes.