Upstream Color Is A Very Odd Film

There is a drug, Scopolamine, favoured by scuba divers in combating the effects of nausea. It was once an antihistamine, and currently NASA is working on a patent for its use as a nasal spray for motion-sick astronauts. In the 1950s, the CIA experimented with it as a truth serum, ruling it out on account of its unpleasant side effects, though it was noted for it powers of suggestibility on subjects. It was used in the early 20th century as an ingredient to induce twilight sleep during childbirth, when mothers were noted to “often volunteer exceedingly candid remarks.”

Its current therapeutic uses extend to the experimental treatment of anxiety and depression. If you believe the reportage of VICE magazine, it is reputedly also widely used on the streets of Bogota and Thailand, to rob tourists and other people unfortunate enough to stray into the local drug trades, where marks are targeted and their drinks spiked. These people then lose their ability to control their actions and are turned essentially into zombies by the “Colombian devil’s breath,” leading them to obediently follow commands like emptying their bank accounts at nearby ATMs, or taking their assailants back with them to their hotel or home and then turning over to them all of their possessions. Victims wake with no memory of this or find themselves in emergency rooms, admitted under the presumption of a psychotic episode.

Perhaps Scopolamine served as the inspiration for one of the plot strands in Shane Carruth’s uncommon new film, Upstream Color — the follow-up to his time-travel cult gem, Primer. Or perhaps not, as Upstream Color is primarily unconcerned with being in any way tethered to the real. More a series of affecting, impressionistic vignettes than a neatly or even partially resolved narrative, the film will impress or confound, depending on either your appreciation of, or tolerance for, filmmaking that doesn’t adhere to conventional modes of storytelling or character development. What exactly transpires during the events onscreen remains opaque, and Carruth borrows liberally in tone from David Lynch, with Cronenbergian body horror elements mixed in for some particularly hard-to-watch early sequences.

While he’s certainly adept at conjuring unnerving and uncanny moods, Carruth is less able to have us care about the characters who populate this world: a world of genetic experiments; human-to-animal mimesis; a small-time drug operation; the loss of identity; a blurring with nature; corporate theft. This becomes increasingly problematic as the the film progresses, and the footholds for the audience become fewer are farther between, leaving us unmoored in an extremely pretty but difficult-to-parse vision. This is not a call for easily digestible, trite storytelling, but more an issue taken with the overly naturalistic dialogue delivery, which stirs confusion where none is necessary. More on which later.

The ideas for Upstream Color percolated in Carruth’s considerable brain for almost nine years — the time that has elapsed since his first film, Primer. That film is fiercely adored by hardcore speculative fiction fans, and rightly so, for its rigorous engagement with extremely lofty ideas: the plausible causal ramifications of time-travel and, more thornily, its moral implications. Almost impossible to fully grasp on a first (or third, or fourth) viewing, Primer’s considerable pleasures are in its rewatching many times over. Its complex theory of time-travel offers no easy clues, has inspired some of the Internet’s most impressive diagrams, and was considerably watered down for the ultimately unsatisfying Looper, on which Carruth served as a consultant.

Primer was equally as impressive for its dedication to its vision as it was for its famed shoestring budget of US$7000. So whether by choice or from necessity, Carruth wrote, directed, edited, starred in and scored the film — and because the stock used to shoot it was the most expensive part of the production, all scenes had to be captured in one take. Once you’ve seen Primer and its dense, complicated dialogue, you’ll understand how impressive that feat is.

Visually, everything about Upstream Color could not be more different — though Carruth remains writer, director, star and composer. Where Primer’s grimy lo-fi 16mm gave it a claustrophobic feel, Upstream Color revels in sumptuous depth of field, occasional saturated brights mixed with cold hues and a coolly detached shooting style fond of stretches of semi-focussed imagery, which creates a very immediate entry into a dream world. What connects the two films is the way the actors deliver their dialogue in quiet, obtuse spurts; overlapping each other; free from context some of the time, in a way that never quite establishes them as real people. It’s as if in striving for an ultimate kind of realism in speech, the characters are instead only half-filled-in — and when what they say is the only clue to what is happening with the narrative, this can become wearying to follow. It’s especially frustrating when the scenes that set up the film are so immediate, intriguing, frightening and strange; a mystery is established, but is never truly resolved.

Briefly: the film is about a man (Shane Carruth) and woman (Amy Seimetz) who meet by chance (or not), and learn they have an extremely unusual and traumatic past event in common, though they can’t recall much of anything that happened to them. They are disconnected completely from the lives they were living before the event, which wiped them of large parts of their identity. They form a bond that they may not be in complete control of, and together try and piece themselves — and the event’s details — back together.

Arguably, logic is not the point of Upstream Color, leaving the question: What is? Carruth is not interested in talking down to his audience, and a large part of the film revolves around viewers having a strong working knowledge of Thoreau’s Walden (and this is your cue: if that idea turns you off, you will hate everything about Upstream Color.) “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, to suck the marrow from the bones of life; to put to rout all that was not life, and not to come to the end of life, and discover that I had not lived,” is the book’s most famous passage. Thoreau lived for two years in a cabin on Walden Pond and kept a diary, the result of which is the book. So is Upstream Color a kind of stealth vegetarian manifesto? A suggestion that we have come to live too detached from nature? A meditation on the decay of day-to-day modern life? About the fragility of connections?

It’s maybe all and none of those things, but it is certainly an open invitation to enter one man’s singular brain (Carruth designed flight simulation software as an engineer, before becoming a filmmaker.) You definitely couldn’t say that what’s there isn’t interesting, but neither could you say, with certainty, what Carruth is trying to tell us with this very odd film. It will be up to you to find what you do there, on your own.

–

Upstream Color screened at the 60th Sydney Film Festival over the weekend, and will be doing the Film Festival rounds before getting a cinematic release in August, through Palace Films.

Perth:

Revelation Perth International Film Festival, July 4-14 – tickets here

New Zealand:

New Zealand International Film Festival, from July 18 – info here

Melbourne:

Melbourne International Film Festival, July 25-August 11 – tickets here
–
Elmo Keep is a writer. She also works as a digital media producer, for clients including Channels Seven, Nine, Ten, the ABC, Foxtel and many other producers.