Film Fest - Two Comedies

Many of the film fest offerings vanish from the site Sunday night, but we managed to catch six films over the weekend, and several were outstanding, including two comedies, Hollywood Fringe, and My Dad is a Sausage.

Hollywood Fringe is a more-than-slightly goofy but largely delightful piece directed by Minneapolis-transplants Megan Huber and Wyatt McDill. It focuses on a few weeks in the lives of a married couple, Travis and Samantha, whose relationship is strained by the fact that after ten years of struggle on the fringes of the entertainment industry, one of their story ideas, Rainbow Farm, has been accepted by a major studio—though Samantha herself has been deemed too old to play the female lead. Travis is willing to drop the project for the sake of marital harmony, but he argues that this might be just the break they've both been working toward. Much of the film, however, is devoted to Samantha's attempts to bolster her self-worth during her idle days by polishing, casting, rehearsing, and putting on a play she wrote years ago that both she and Travis agree is terrible.

The core of affectionately antagonistic marital tit-for-tat between the leads, played by Justin Kirk (of Weeds and Perry Mason fame) and indie stalwart Jennifer Prediger, is solid from the get-go. Kirk is pragmatic and wry as he tries to maintain family harmony while watching the couple's project get distorted out of recognition by the whims of the new producers, but as the film develops most of the humor and energy come from Prediger and the small cast she assembles to put on her play. 

The casting process itself is hilarious, with a long string of wannabes emoting histrionically in front of a white sheet in the couple's apartment, but the three actors Samanta chooses are all amusing and fully capable of holding the screen. The activities Samantha puts them through seem more like psychotherapy than drama rehearsal to me; then again, what do I know about modern theater? In any case, they provide some of the more unlikely and hilarious episodes in the film, and they also underscore one of the movie's central themes. Travis and Samantha had moved to L. A. from Minneapolis out of a desire to escape from a bourgeois life, express themselves, and change the world. What they have come to discover in ten years on the Hollywood fringe is that, to quote one of the executives involved in developing Rainbow Farm,  "show business isn't about shows, it's about business."

Without carrying on too long about the film, I ought to mention one additional element. The title alludes not only to Travis and Samantha's position in the Hollywood entertainment industry but also to the fringe festivals that now take place in many cities in Europe and the United States, including Minneapolis. Performances at these multi-day fests are usually brief, invariably low-budget, and often staged at ad hoc venues or on-the-fly. In quite a few of the scenes in Hollywood Fringe, the camera eventually pulls back to reveal that what we had presumed to be an intimate dialog taking place in a bedroom or kitchen is actually being performed in front of an audience. We accept the scene as having taken place because it makes sense and  furthers the narrative—unlike some of the bizarre time-loops in Mulholland Drive, for example—but this self-reflective perspective adds a subtle tinge of "playing house" or of absurdist drama to the mix, allowing us, for example, to accept and enjoy even the most jejune of Samantha's existential cries de coeur.   

It isn't easy to make an entertaining film in which the characters poke fun at their youthful idealism while at the same time continuing to espouse it effectively, but Hollywood Fringe succeeds at doing so. It reminded me not only of local fringe fest performances I've seen, but also of the early dramas of Max Frisch or Peter Handke (only much more cheerful) and that under-rated film, I (Heart) Huckabees, in which an all-star cast that includes Jude Law, Naomi Watts, Dustin Hoffman, and Isabelle Huppert keep an absurdist eco-metaphysical plot-line afloat by sheer chutzpah.   

The Dutch comedy My Dad is a Sausage explores a vaguely similar theme, as a middle-aged banker almost arbitrarily quits his job and decides to become an actor—a profession about which he knows almost nothing, although his friends told him he was good in his high school. His wife, who's usually off in China securing contracts for her father's line of chocolates, is shocked by her husband's decision, and she becomes even more distraught when she learns that he has taken their twelve-year-old daughter Zoë, who has experienced bullying at school, out of class on sick leave. She now helps him rehearse and accompanies him to auditions when she's not creating imaginative collages in her room that depict her troubled family life.

Much of the film's appeal lies in the rapport that develops between father and daughter, though the comic elements proliferate when he finally lands a job portraying a meatless sausage in a TV commercial. Zoë's drawings, which become animated on the screen, are also wonderful to see, and in time the film becomes almost saturated with a sophisticated and delightful sweetness not unlike the chocolates Zoë's mother used to design, before she took on the marketing responsibilities of her tiresome and conservative father's business.