Evan Glodell, the writer, director and star of
Bellflower,
has said that his debut movie was inspired by a bad breakup, which is
about as revelatory a disclosure as Martin Scorsese admitting that
Mean Streets
was influenced by Catholicism. The film was shot with a custom-built
digital camera, but I’m pretty sure it’s made out of hate sex. It is
exactly like
All the Real Girls if David Gordon Green had grown
up worshipping Ozploitation flicks instead of Terrence Malick, and if he
couldn’t help finishing every emotional confrontation by pulling out a
flamethrower. I mean, this is a movie in which the romantically
devastated hero considers a litany of different responses, playing each
option out in his head—and not one of them fails to include a
flamethrower.
This synopsis makes Bellflower sound funny, which
it is not. It is silly, but it is not funny. In fact, it is often very
upsetting, in the way that the thought of going mad is upsetting. I have
rarely seen a movie not made by Scorsese that so precisely captures the
place where male insecurity and impotence become male violence. It is a
film about truly impure thoughts, and it calls to mind the famous
priestly question, “Did you entertain them?” Bellflower compulsively strokes those thoughts into an elaborate phantasmagoria.
So, then—not a date
movie. But it does contain dates, many of them notably tender in a
heedless way. Some of these outings are between Woodrow (Glodell) and
his best friend, Aiden (Tyler Dawson), who have the destructive platonic
chemistry of the Sobotka boys on season two of The Wire, and share a fondness—not to say a fetish—for the Road Warrior
movies, and especially the hulking, bondage-clad Lord Humungus. Their
idea of a productive afternoon is going into the California brush,
chaining a propane tank between two poles and setting it on fire. Later,
Woodrow spends evenings with Milly (Jessie Wiseman), a girl who styles
herself as a man-eating tramp, but is really very sweet. They take an
impromptu road trip to Texas in a Volvo Bertone fitted with a whiskey
dispenser. They share kindness. Then she inexplicably becomes a
man-eating tramp. He responds poorly.
Here is a lesson in
how a $17,000 budget can buy you a summer’s worth of free controversy.
Getting almost as much attention as Glodell’s cars and cameras (much of
the movie is filmed in the limited focus that David Fincher used to make
the rowing scenes in The Social Network look like miniatures) is the question of whether Bellflower
is misogynist. That question hinges on exactly how much distance
Glodell keeps from his characters and their almost helplessly vile
imaginings. It is worth noting that this criticism—how much do you
identify with these people?—is the same one usually leveled against
female filmmakers (Miranda July and Lena Dunham, most recently) who make
intimate movies about real feelings, and is never applied to the dozens
of hacks who make Marvel adaptations, even though everybody who watches
those movies is supposed to identify with the juvenile, banal machismo
of the heroes.
The nastiness in Bellflower
comes from a far less calculated place. But it seems fairly clear that
Glodell is aware how pathetic Woodrow’s revenge meditations are: Just
look at the movie’s epigraph, “Lord Humungus shall not be defied,” and
how it is credited to, well, one Lord Humungus. As important as the
operatic assault at the movie’s end are the scenes of Woodrow scouring
the fields in slo-mo with his flamethrower—it cannot be an accident that
he is compensating for emasculation with a fiery phallus. That said,
Glodell’s awareness about the thoughts of Woodrow doesn’t change the
fact that the actions of Milly make no sense. Great art has to contain
the perspectives of multiple people, even when one person’s emotions are
a raw wound. Bellflower is the work of a director bravely
admitting that he doesn’t understand how to relate to women. It would be
a better movie if he understood women.
70 SEE IT: Bellflower is rated R. It opens Friday at Fox Tower.
