Memento and the Charlie Kauffman-scripted films seem to have started off a mini-genre of off-beat genre independent films. Primer (d. Shane Carruth), at least, wraps science fiction and a little bit of thriller within the realist ethos of the indie film. The results are great.
I don’t want to reveal too much of the narrative - and besides the plot points are still inscrutable after one viewing - but the plot gimmicks work on the sheer force of the filmmaking and the narrative pace. The filmmakers rely on existing light cinematography, producing a wonderful array of hue that seem both realistic and expressionistic at once. They take the limitations of budget in stride, using careful composition instead of static tableau shots; they even move the camera quite ably from time to time. And they put their characters in the midst of the subjective experience of the large-scale transformations of the narrative, making the implausible believable. None of these are new, of course, but they’re lessons so forgetton by either American indie filmmakers and Hollywood alike, that Carruth deserves credit for sticking to them.
The aesthetic match of realism and expressionism works so well because it matches a narrative that’s half fantastic and half a well-observed document of startup culture and the culture of twenty-something middle-class men who inhabit it. It’s also nice - and really overdue - to see location shooting somewhere besides California, New York City, or New Jersey. Though sociological realism seems at best a secondary goal of the film, it does capture the cultural landscape of the New South, at least that fraction that Dallas, TX, inhabits.
I’m just wondering why this played only a week or two in Boston.
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