The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That Makes Getting High Look Dull Dull Dull:
Heaven Knows What, dir. Josh and Benny Safdie
Starring: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones
Reviewed by: Harry Windsor
The brothers Josh and Benny Safdie make shoestring-budget films on the streets of New York with non-actors often featured in central roles. Before now — in their debut The Pleasures of Being Robbed and its follow-up Daddy Longlegs, as well as in several shorts — the brothers have displayed a winning light touch. Their latest, Heaven Knows What — based on the experiences of a teenage Arielle Holmes, whose book Big Love in New York City is credited as the film’s inspiration (though it sounds more like a concurrent creation and is still unpublished) — stars Holmes as a version of herself, and banishes the light completely.
Harley (Holmes) is a heroin addict living rough one winter in the Big Apple. She’s in love with Ilya, another user played by Caleb Landry Jones (a long way from the X-mansion, where he boarded as Banshee in X-Men: First Class), and to prove her love, Harley slits her wrists in front of Ilya and his pals in the very first scene. After a brief sojourn in hospital the film adopts the occasionally vivid, mainly monotonous routine of addict life.
Sean Price Williams, the regular cinematographer for Listen Up Philip and Queen of Earth’s Alex Ross Perry, makes this the most formally fluid of the brothers’ films to date. Harley’s stay at Bellevue, where she recuperates after her suicide attempt, is even captured in one long sustained take. We slide past the denizens of the ward while the credits unfurl, and it’s as dexterous and slightly queasy as the movie itself. Once she’s out, Harley hooks up with Mike (Buddy Duress) and fritters away her time in parks with other addicts, scavenging, shooting up, and occasionally running into the enigmatic Ilya.
Heaven Knows What is a stringently unromantic portrait of fringe dwelling and love, but its authentically monotone picture of street life also makes it kind of deadening. It’s a relief to see another film about the street, like Sean Baker’s Tangerine, unafraid to depart from a supposedly verité absence of style. The electronic music supplied by Ariel Pink, Paul Grimstad and Japanese recycler Isao Tomita give the petty melodramas on display the sense of grandeur they no doubt have in the minds of the characters.
All in all, it results in a film of looping, depressing repetitions, about the brink of death and how mundane it looks, that are ultimately as stultifying as the lives it depicts — which is exactly the idea, but still.
For fans of: The Panic in Needle Park, challenging cinema, synth
Opens in Australia: Coming to DVD September 23