>>PREVIEW
WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY
STARRING Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon and Tom Waits
DIRECTED BY Goran Dukic
Saturday, April 14
Hifi Club
Controversy is turning Sunday school lessons into gore porn for Catholics. Controversy is Woody Harrelson wielding a shotgun and advocating killing sprees to the kids. Controversy is prodding racial tensions in LA before the Riots. In comparison, the story of two lovers falling in love after their deaths in a purgatory type world for suicides seems innocuous. Months before the film’s August release, Wristcutters: A Love Story finds itself the target of damning slogans and chastising press releases based on its name alone. The recently released posters, a traffic sign displaying an arm with cuts in the wrist, have not helped. From his home in Los Angeles, director and writer Goran Dukic remains unaware of the controversy his little film has caused.
"So far I haven’t met people who resisted seeing the movie because of the title," he says. "At the festivals, people were open to see it. We screened it at at least 50 festivals and we’ve won a lot of awards. I don’t even understand how all this is possible, because the movie hasn’t started and posters don’t exist or at least I haven’t seen them. People say, ‘How can you make a movie about suicide,’ and I don’t understand those kinds of criticism. They should wait until they see it."
A gala film at this year’s Calgary Underground Film Festival, audiences will get their turn to puritanically rage and protest the film. Wristcutters: A Love Story takes place in a purgatory world for suicide deaths resembling our own, but a tad bit crappier – otherwise known as Los Angeles. Zia (Patrick Fugit) finds himself in this world after killing himself over an ex-girlfriend, spending his afterlife drinking and playing pool with Eugene (Shea Whigham). After hearing from a recently deceased friend that the girl he killed himself for also committed suicide, Zia embarks on a road trip to win her back. Along the way, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) joins them, insisting she’s dead by accident and needs to rectify the mistake. As well, a bevy of guest stars show up to impart wisdom. These include Tom Waits and Will Arnett, basically reprising his role on Arrested Development to play a messiah figure. In the end, the value of life is learned and love prevails.
Wristcutters: A Love Story is actually based on the more inconspicuously named novella by Etgar Keret, Kneller’s Happy Campers. Though Dukic admits to having little experience with suicide or wristcutting, he was drawn to the novella’s mixture of dark themes and uplifting messages. Following the same plot, the film elaborates on the world by establishing small rules that forbid stars in the skies and give its denizens’ the inability to smile. Regardless, it seems much of the controversy could have been avoided by sticking to the novella’s original title.
"I didn’t feel it was appropriate for the movie," says the director/writer. "There was a bar in the script which was called Wristcutters. The outside of the bar got cut out of the film, so now we don’t know that."
That’s the least of the film’s problems. Those looking for a dark comedy or controversy will instead get a conventional romantic comedy set in an unconventional world. The Calgary Underground Film Festival specializes in the avant garde, the bizarre and the provocative. Wristcutters: A Love Story is not any of these. Outside the opening moments of the film, where Zia slits his wrists after cleaning his room, the movie is as dark as You’ve Got Mail. The entire film has the visual verve and energy of those scenes where Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan read and type out e-mails to each other, except without the charm. Dukic rarely explores this fascinating world he establishes and it’s a shame. A low budget film, Dukic does manage to effectively use what he has at hand to convey the despair and hopelessness of this world.
"I just stuck to L.A., because it’s very much desert and lots of junk yards," says Dukic. "Downtown Los Angles also looks pretty shady. It really does look worse than anywhere else. We didn’t have the money to build an ultimate universe, so most of our location scouting was spent driving around the deserts of Los Angeles for a couple of months. There’s a shot of a half buried car (in the film) and it was actually there, we just found it."
Such evocative shots do little to save the film. Ponderous in pacing and with few laughs, Wristcutters: A Love Story is a conventional movie hiding behind a big scary name. That’s the only controversy. |
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