Showing @ ICA 1 Wed 30 Oct 21:00
Alistair Banks Griffin/ USA 2010/ 79 min
A crisis of identity, whether on a creative or personal level, can usually be traced to a rejection or misunderstanding of our collective past. For America, and especially contemporary American filmmakers, this inability to connect to the complex history of the country and the world around them often leaves flat, lifeless features that lack that certain je ne sais quoi. When newbie director Alistair Banks Griffin’s stepped onto the stage to introduce his first feature Two Gates of Sleep and spoke about his attempts to create a piece that reflected French cinema, American Deep South and man’s relationship with nature in a transcendental fashion, we knew we were about to witness that rare combination of art, history and American culture.
Set in a run-down shack in a vast forest on the Louisiana-Mississippi border, two brothers Jack (Brady Corbet) and Louis (David Call) sit in silence, smoke, turn the lights out and head out to hunt. When their ill mother Bess (Karen Young) is found dead, the pair build a coffin and carry it on an epic journey through rivers, across the forest to offer her final peace.
Griffin’s direction is entirely hypnotic and barely half a page of dialogue is uttered throughout the entire film, it’s the harsh, echoing cello and minimal sound track that take you on the journey and allow you to draw your own feelings and thoughts on the images that flow from the screen. Retching and broken, Corbet and Call turn in great performances that whilst being still and personal hold a degree of theatricality and other-worldliness that’s rarely captured so well in such an intimate surrounding. As the pair trek through the American landscape warped by its own deflected myths the image of them dragging the weight of their mother behind them slips in the idea of the dangerous burden of the generational schisms and wayward sense of Manifest Destiny that so many Americans entering adulthood will be affected by, barely understanding the anger and desperation of their ancestors which is fed down to them from birth. With more than a passing resemblance to the great plays of Sam Shepard, Two Gates of Sleep plays with notions of fractured identity and our unnatural alienation from each other and the natural world. With no firm conclusion, Jack looks up from his mother’s grave trapped in this image of the natural earth unable to acknowledge himself, the camera turns to the road and the encroaching industry that surrounds him. Thoughtful, well-executed and dealing with the psyche on a whole new plain, Griffin’s is one to watch.