Bernard is joined by Zach this week, who brings with him an interview with Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva about his new film Nasty Baby, starring Tunde Adebimpe and Kristen Wiig and the director himself. Also, with the release of Netflix’s Beasts of No Nation, the boys try to predict what the future of digital distribution will look like and how streaming sites like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and the like will impact the movie theater industry. PLUS, (you guessed it) our Indie Picks of the Week!
Beasts of No Nation Review
Cary Joji Fukunaga Interview
Junun Review
Nasty Baby Review
Sebastian Silva Interview
On my list of Saturday Night Live‘s greatest alum, Kristen Wiig is quickly climbing the charts. Of course her terrific work on the show is a key part of that, but it’s what Wiig has done outside of the show, especially since leaving, that puts her in a special place. Like other SNLers who traded TV for movies (Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, Eddie Murphy), Wiig has found great success in her comedy comfort zone. She starred in the hugely successful Bridesmaids, a film that not only ranks as the highest-grossing SNL alum debut, it also earned Wiig a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination (with co-writer Annie Mumolo). But rather than wallow in a familiar well until it runs dry (like those aforementioned alum), Wiig has taken a much quirkier career path. A quick glimpse at her resume shows strong work in indie darlings like The Skeleton Twins and Diary of a Teenage Girl, as well as riskier choices in more offbeat offerings like Hateship Loveship and Welcome to Me. Her latest film falls into that risky, offbeat category.
In writer/director Sebastián Silva‘s Nasty Baby, Wiig stars as Polly, a woman trying to have a baby with her gay best friend, multi-media artist Freddy (Silva, also starring). After months of failure, testing shows Freddy’s sperm count to be low. With some persuading, Freddy’s boyfriend, Mo (Tunde Adebimpe), agrees to donate his sperm to the cause. Meanwhile, tension mounts in the trio’s New York City neighborhood as the behavior of an unhinged neighbor, a man who calls himself The Bishop (Reg E. Cathey), grows more and more confrontational, even becoming dangerous. His behavior escalates from annoying early-morning leaf-blowing sessions to vicious homophobic verbal assaults lobbed at Freddy. This ever-growing rift comes to threaten Freddy’s world.
Early on, Nasty Baby is a charming film about three characters who defy conventionality. Two minorities, in a same-sex relationship, are attempting surrogate pregnancy with a woman who, by all accounts, will be a part of the child’s life. That would be one baby with three parents, none of whom fit what society has come to expect as the traditional parental mold. And yet filmmaker Silva, along with his cast, make this arrangement feel incredibly natural, even familiar. There’s never a doubt this arrangement is insincere, nor is there any notion it might fail, post-baby. The charisma and chemistry among the leads solves that and is the film’s great strength.
Beneath the surface of this pleasantly offbeat story, the film wants to be a meditation on the universal balance of creation and destruction. Mo is a horticulturist by hobby but a woodworker by trade. Creation/destruction. When Mo is donating his sperm at the medical clinic where Polly is a nurse, she suddenly can’t chat with him because a battered woman comes in (one Polly knows from previous abusive incidents) and requires immediate attention. Creation/destruction. When Freddy and Polly travel to meet Mo’s family, tension is created by a few of Mo’s narrow-minded family members. Mo, Freddy and Polly are trying to do something borne of love while others judge them based on intolerance. Creation/destruction.
Then the third act comes in and irreparably damages the film. Don’t worry, no spoilers ahead.
Three key events that occur in succession in the third act are designed and presented in such a way as to be collectively considered inconceivable. The first event, involving Freddy’s art, is believable, but only to a point; beyond that, the eyebrow cocks. The second event, involving circumstances related to Polly’s attempted pregnancy, betrays the very character she has been to that point; something about the film now seems amiss. As for the third and final event, it is so far removed from anything remotely rational, the viewer is left wondering if what is being presented is a reel from an entirely different film, or maybe some form of catharsis for Silva. Either way, what should have been the “final conflict and resolution” is instead so tonally foreign, it renders the first two acts mostly irrelevant.
Two things make this disappointing and frustrating. First is that the core of that third event—not its final design or execution, but the basic conflict and the general path to it—makes sense. (In fact, it’s almost predictable.) The execution, though, is stupefying. Related to that (and other than seeing a terrific effort taken out back and set on fire) is that the trio of events, despite the devil in the details, still work within the thematic construct of creation/destruction. Somehow Silva managed to hang onto his core theme even though he realized he couldn’t close, opting instead to jam the pedal to the floor and hope for the best.
The net is the worst possible result: not a bad effort made nor a great effort flawed, but a good effort wasted.
Thankfully Kristin Wiig’s cinematic selections aren’t wasted though. It might be a mixed bag from a qualitative perspective, but her choices have ranged from confident to bold, and Nasty Baby is no exception. Her next few films bring her back to her comedic comfort zone, but I’m already looking beyond those to see what unique and daring choices she’ll make in the future.
]]>Nasty Baby lulls you into thinking it’s one type of movie before revealing its true intention. Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva (The Maid, Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus) has no qualms with pulling the rug out from underneath his audience. In fact, he designed Nasty Baby that way specifically. “How much can I stretch the time for my characters to hang out,” began Silva, “so my audience will have the hardest time possible judging them when they commit a crime?”
Telling the story of gay couple Freddy (Silva, in his acting debut) and Mo (TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe), and their attempts to artificially inseminate their friend Polly (Kristen Wiig) while contending with a disruptive neighbor named The Bishop (Reg E. Cathey), Nasty Baby skirts around expectations up through its jarring final moments. In his sit down with Way Too Indie, Sebastian Silva discusses drawing influence from real-life urban landscapes, balancing behind-the-camera duties with acting, and the benefits of introducing new plot elements mid-way through the final act.
Spoilers begin mid-way through article and are identified by the “Spoilers Section” heading.
There are a lot of people in this story who could be considered outsiders, but they feel familiar. Anybody who has lived in a city knows of someone like The Bishop.
Yeah, everybody knows a Bishop for sure. If you’ve been in New York, or any city.
Are you drawing from your own experiences in Fort Greene?
There’s a lot of, I don’t know, beggars or people collecting things. People mumbling to themselves, being crazy in the streets, they are part of the urban landscape. They are there every day. I have experienced that more superficially here. I never got into a quarrel with any of those people. Maybe an exchange of words if they are assholes.
[The Bishop] comes more from one of these characters that I found in Chile. I was in Chile, probably shooting a film, and then I was staying in a neighborhood that is pretty hip. There was a neighbor that lived around there that was very much like The Bishop.
What was weird about him… even though everybody knows a Bishop this one in the movie he has keys to a house. Like, next door. He has access to one of these privileged home. These fancy brownstones in this neighbor. So he’s not a complete invader. He has his place. Nevertheless he’s terrorizing the neighborhood in its own way but it is a very ambiguous character. You don’t know what his business is… This is more based on a Chilean Bishop.
That’s the interesting contrast, Freddy doesn’t think The Bishop belongs but The Bishop doesn’t think Freddy belongs either. There’s a lot of people testing their limits with other people. Were you looking to push these characters outside of their comfort zones?
I feel that all writing is that. You have somebody in a comfortable position and then you give them a challenge. That’s pretty much where storytelling begins. I was not consciously thinking exactly that way just because it seems like a thing I take for granted. You need to push them out of their comfort zone.
The shooting style has lots of handheld, close-up shots, hanging out with these characters in very private moments. Did you want to capture an intimate feel to bring audiences into these characters?
Handheld is mostly what I’ve done in my movies, anyway. The way that I work with my DP Sergio Armstrong it’s always [like that]. On my first film, Life Kills Me, it was more sticks (i.e. tripods) and dollies but after that everything’s been handheld. The kind of stories I’m telling… when you’re telling a story that’s naturalistic, you want to portray some sense of reality to make people feel that they’re actually witnessing a piece of reality. I feel that only handheld makes sense.
Even our heads move. If you’re sitting on a chair, and witnessing something on a street, the way that you see things still feels more handheld than sticks because your head is moving up and down or things get in your way. You never see life as you see it on sticks. Your face is never fixed. In order to reproduce a sense of reality, I feel that handheld is the most effective method.
We also had time constraints as we always do in small, independent films. Going handheld also helps with the pace of shooting. You can move back and forth, do a close-up and a wide in the same shot without ever turning the camera off. It was a movie that was just begging for handheld. I don’t know how else I would have shot this film.
This is also the first time you’ve starred in one of your own films, how much of a challenge was it for you to balance those on-set responsibilities?
It was very challenging. I knew I was not going to have any issues playing Freddy when he’s doing normal shit – celebrating his boyfriend’s birthday, biking on the streets or rock climbing with a friend – I was never scared of playing that part of it. When Freddy has to [do more dramatic, spoiler-related actions] and then react to it, I was terrified of that scene and how I was going to pull that off. I did a little bit of a rehearsal and it was terrible.
I was like, “Fuck! I cannot share this with anyone because I really, truly suck at this.” But then that same fear pushed me to do it. The fear of failure that I could actually ruin this film with the stupid idea of starring in it. It was fun and I overcame the challenge. I don’t think I’m the best performer at all but I think that I look like Freddy. I look like that dude.
The most difficult thing for me that I hadn’t thought of, strangely, was the fact that I was going to be in front of the camera all of the time. I forgot, me as the director, I’m always behind it. We had such little time to shoot the film, I did not have time to look at footage. I was unaware of my performance, really. I would look at some things on the camera when I felt that things were weird or something, but most of the time I was trusting my co-actors like Kristen and Tunde, whoever was with me in the scene, and also my DP who has a really good eye for bad acting. I was among really smart people with good taste and bad acting alertness.
People who could keep you in check.
Pretty much. Also, I have to say, when you’re part of a scene, even more than being behind the camera, you can sense if things feel real. When you are in the situation, there are cameras filming you but you can forget about that for a second. You’re drinking water, you’re interacting with people. If the interactions somehow feel fake you know. You just know because you’re part of it. How could you not know that there’s something odd about it?
If there was something odd about it, I would try my best to overcome that oddness and make it natural. Make myself feel that I was really going through the situation we were portraying. It didn’t feel as hard, to be honest, as I thought it would be but it was definitely adrenaline inducing. At some points you had to delegate your trust to friends. It was a great exercise in letting go and trust.
What kicked off your interest in this story?
I think it was the storyline of the Bishop, a gay couple, and the confrontations between them. A figure like The Bishop – an unwanted man in a neighborhood that is really harmonious – and a gay couple with one of them getting really frustrated by the presence of this man then taking the law in his hands by accident. That was the initial idea for a film and it had so many elements, like the crime, the moral question of whether good people do bad things. In the end, if you make [The Bishop] disappear and make this gay couple get away with murder, would the audience hate them forever? Can you make the audience forgive them or have a hard time judging them?
That was kind of the original idea and then it transformed into this hybrid that also mixes in the compulsive desire to reproduce among mid-30s or early-40s people. Why do they want to have babies? How far would they go to have a baby? Those two things then mixed up and created this idea.
Then the Nasty Baby aspect of it, Freddy doing these disgusting performances, came out of a really old idea I had, like, 15 years ago. It was like what Freddy describes in the beginning of the film. I thought that that could be a fun performance, portraying a baby. Embodying a baby in front of an audience and making a total ass of myself, go through the embarrassment of it with other people. Those three things created this film.
You have this trio of characters coming together to form a sort of family just in time for them to face their biggest challenge, I was curious what was the thought process behind combining these two distinctly disparate elements in Nasty Baby?
It’s a very manipulative movie in the first place. I know what I’m doing. I’m adding a very horrifying act for our main characters to perpetrate in the second half of the third act, which is really late in storytelling. By that moment, when this happens, things should be closing out. They should be brainstorming names for the baby at that point. They shouldn’t be trying to clean up blood in a bathtub. It’s a very conscious experiment to make my audience identify or love or understand where these characters are coming from for as long as I possibly can. How much can I stretch the time for my characters to hang out so my audience will have the hardest time possible judging them when they commit a crime?
If they commit the crime in the first half of the movie, the audience is not so involved with them. They will find them completely white, gentrified assholes who are killing a black, mentally handicapped man in a bathtub. But then, by the moment that they do it, you even find out that she’s pregnant. So you’re rooting for them so much that you fail to see the fucked-up-ness and the social injustice of what they’re doing in that bathtub. Which I also have conflicts judging. I, personally, as a writer, even as a human being. I’m not completely sure if I want them to get caught for what they did.
I think that the politics in the movie are really obvious. There’s not much to discuss. We all know that shit is very unjust and sad, but for me it’s more about the moral doubts that I leave my audience with. Do good people do bad things or are they actually fucking evil? These people might not be prepared to have a baby. It could even be seen as a homophobic movie. The moral confusion that’s left by the end of the film is the success for me. The open questions to all of these moral riddles.
I feel like in a lot of films a death loses its meaning because we see filmic deaths so often, but to have this one come so late really hits you
Yeah, you have it so late and you don’t even give the audience time to really process it. All the processing comes at their houses after watching the movie or in their cars or when they’re having dinner. I appreciate that, I feel that it’s something that I’m exploring again in a movie that I want to make now. A little bigger film, where again there is a plot that comes in very late and you just don’t expect it.
Nasty Baby, after they kill The Bishop, everything is kind of an epilog. They get rid of the body and it becomes a sort of urban fable. We don’t care about logistics. It’s not important, like, “How did they get the body inside the car? How come nobody saw them?” We’re not caring about that verisimilitude. Is that the word?
Probably.
[laughs] It’s not important to me, for me it’s more important that what’s eating the audience is, “Oh my god, these guys! We like you! How could you kill somebody? Please, god, let them get away with this. Let them have their baby in peace.” Or, “These motherfucking hipsters. I hope they get caught. I hope the police find them.”
You leave people with all of these questions, all of these expectations, projections, desires. These three people who you bond with, an audience projects all of their fears and sense of justice onto them. I find that to be the most fascinating part of this film, to be honest. If this film did not have that twist by the very end, yeah maybe it would be a sweet movie about three friends having a baby in Brooklyn, but it’s very uninteresting as a piece. I would not be into it.
Do you want all your films to leave that kind of impact?
I hope so. I think that maybe Magic Magic has it a little bit but I think even Magic Magic ends in a way that’s a relief. Death comes as a relief for Alicia especially who is suffering so much in this schizophrenic, paranoid episode she’s suffering from makes her so miserable. When she finally dies you’re relieved, at least myself. I don’t see death as the ultimate punishment, either. There are things way worse than death.
I think Magic Magic and Nasty Baby, and more so Nasty Baby, the morals of the story are not clear. You leave the audience with a lot to chew. I like that a lot. I feel that the movie closes nicely. It’s not a movie that all of a sudden cuts to black in the middle of nowhere. It cuts to black in a place that makes sense. I’m not pushing my audience off a cliff, I’m leading them to an end that is a little abrupt but at the same time, there’s nothing left to say.
It’s not quite ambiguous.
Yeah, it’s not ambiguous. You are left with moral ambiguity. That’s an achievement to me. I hope that’s what people take out of it.
Jason Schwartzman has perfected the alchemy of the self-centered but likable asshole, a petty narcissist out looking for love and acceptance in all the wrong places who, despite his hardened outer shell, really does have his heart in the right place. We’ve seen it before, born and arguably perfected during his work with his pal Wes Anderson, the character might have reached its peak in last year’s acerbic Listen Up, Philip. And the truth is, there are few other actors working today who could have made Listen Up, Philip watchable, let alone made audiences root for such a vain prick. But Schwartzman did all that and more. And now, with Bob Byington’s (Somebody Up There Likes Me) 7 Chinese Brothers, Schwartzman is working his magic again, while managing to salvage some of the film around him.
The beats of 7 Chinese Brothers are rather simple. Schwartzman plays Larry, a hard-drinking, hardly working schlub, who spends his days motor mouthing through one-sided conversations with his so-ugly-he’s-cute bulldog, Arrow. Larry’s life is going nowhere, and he seems happy with that. But things take a turn when he’s fired from his serving job for stealing booze and drinking on the job. Judging from Larry’s response, it’s easy to see he’s been here before. In fact, not much in his life changes at first. That same night Larry hits the clubs with his buddy Major Norwood (Tunde Adebimpe of TV On The Radio), pops some pills, and wakes up on his couch the next day. The one thing Larry does right in his life is visit his foul-mouthed grandma (Olympia Dukakis) in her assisted living home. Even as she continues to rebuff his pleas for money, he keeps visiting.
It seems only by chance that Larry winds up working at Quick Lube, vacuuming cars and stealing change. Soon, though, Larry realizes that he likes both this new job and his new boss (Eleanore Pienta) — a feeling that’s complicated by Norwood’s mysterious skills with women.
What’s clear from start to finish is that Larry doesn’t have much of a filter. Time and again he speaks out of line, uttering every humorous and asinine thing that pops into his head. Not only that, but he doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks either. It’s this unfiltered Schwartzman that keeps 7 Chinese Brothers up and running for as long as it does (and the film is brisk, clocking in at 76 minutes).
The narrative, on paper, makes sense and offers Larry some room to grow, but the film seems uninterested in any sort of progression, meandering often. Granted there are films and filmmakers who make this work, building their films to embody the marooned and stagnant characters they have set out to study. But here the story beats that Byington does choose to hit and follow, often do little to help us understand Larry or help him understand himself (with one particular subplot about his boss’ ex-husband and his petty theft being the worst of all).
Films like 7 Chinese Brothers are inherently challenging to make. Most movies are built upon one of two things: the movement of plot or the growth of character. Which is not to say that films about directionless people aren’t valuable or enjoyable (many of Schwartzman’s characters are in fact rather directionless or otherwise inhibited). But rather that the challenge is particularly great to find a way to invest an audience in someone going nowhere and wanting nothing (Larry claims to want a lot but does very little to get any of it). And, arguably, the only reason we invest in Larry at all is Arrow, Schwartzman’s real-life pet and reaction shot master. Not only does Arrow feel like the emotional core of the film, but he also steals damn near every scene he’s in.
On the technical end, the score by Vampire Weekend’s Chris Baio is energetic and subdued all at once, bringing a nice forward push that might have otherwise been absent from the proceedings. At times, though, the music seems to take on a life of it’s own, diverging from the scene to become an independent and less resonant song.
Finally, while the film is clearly flawed, the most obvious misstep seems to have been born in the editing room. Pieced together by Robert Greene and Leah Marino, 7 Chinese Brothers doesn’t ever feel clunky or haphazard, but it does feel lost rather often, like chunks of time have been excised or forgotten. While not quite fatal, it is hard not to feel muddled or confounded when you can’t even figure out where the scene is taking place or what sort of odd architecture a building has.
For all the mess that is the film’s final third, 7 Chinese Brothers remains a light-on-its-feet comedy shouldered along by a solid performance from Schwartzman, by turns hilarious, caustic, and ultimately mournful. And while many might find themselves wondering what the point is, it’s hard to flaw a film that, unlike so many, refuses to judge its characters, and refuses to tell them how they ought to be living.
]]>Jason Schwartzman has always been a bit manic onscreen, his characters often charmingly smarmy. He’s quite possibly the perfect example of “flawed but likable”—which, by the way, is a deep compliment. So, while last year’s Listen Up Philip mixed up the formula a bit, Schwartzman seems to be back in his comfort zone with the first trailer for 7 Chinese Brothers.
The flick follows Larry (Schwartzman) as he’s booted from one job and forced to hunt down another—a large feat for the oft-inebriated slacker. Soon, though, Larry gets a bite at a tire and lube shop and meets Lupe, who just might help him get his life in order.
Written and directed by Bob Byington (Somebody Up There Likes Me), the cast is rounded out by Stephen Root, Olympia Dukakis, and TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe. The film premiered at SXSW earlier this year to some positive nods, and the trailer promises laughs. But honestly, we’d line up for Schwartzman alone.
7 Chinese Brothers opens August 28th. Check out the first trailer below.
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