MicroCinema Scene

My favorite band since I was a teenager has been (and continues to be) the rock group R.E.M. (Insert collective eye-roll here.) What I most admire about them is an unwillingness to do what is expected of them; while still managing to craft brilliantly melodic songs with increasingly discernable, beautiful lyrics, they also stay their own path. Even when they signed a huge contract with Warner Bros. back in the 90’s for a hundred million dollars, they managed to keep themselves fresh and real. But what I never liked about them were their music videos, specifically those crafted by lead singer and Godard-wannabe Michael Stipe. Arbitrary, ambling and crudely short, they have artistic flourishes but ultimately work only to create a mood while meaning goes out the window. I suppose these visuals are equivalent to the band’s early lyric writing, imprecise and mood-driven, but the lyrics back then were fun. The videos are simply head-scratching.

Amir Motlagh riffs on Godard and others from the French New Wave while assembling the art-film/documentary Pumkin Little, and the results are very much like an R.E.M. music video. While Motlagh has a fantastic eye for creative visuals and assembles some interesting edits with music, voice-over and image, ultimately the lack of direction of the entire piece makes it crash unto itself leaving the viewer asking more than once “What am I watching?” Ostensibly, the documentary is about 8th grade memories as recalled by a group of Asian teens and twenty-something’s living in Southern Califorinia, and the movie is most successful when these stories are in focus. Acting as a kind of narrative thread is the over-arching story of a break-dancer who meditates on how he has walked the line between being a gangster and a good kid because of his culture and interests. In actuality, however, the movie gets sidetracked on visual and anecdotal diversions that toss it way off course, especially an opening five minute, crudely edited segment which watches as the break-dancer hangs out with a female friend in bed while they discuss her day.

I suspect that like Michael Stipe when he creates videos for his band, Amir Motlagh understands what he is doing, but only will allow you hints as to the true nature of his business. He wants you to leave with a feeling, and in Pumkin Little you do: you’re unsettled, yet hopeful; the marriage of these 8th grade stories with often non-illustrative video working to create a dark mood while the narration offers hope for the future. The break dancing sequences too are hopeful, a signpost on the road to escape for our central narrator who wants to get out of gangland. And his constant waffling on the decision to quit dancing (he never does quit) leaves one with the hope that he’ll stay his course.

It’s hard to say if a more “traditional” approach to Pumkin Little would have helped it as an overall movie-going experience. Had it been more traditional, it could have lost a lot of its confusing emotionality, something I believe Motlagh defines his work by. But as is, with sporadic bursts of screeching electric guitar interspersed with acoustic dirges over disconnected narration and images, this viewer spent too long wondering what he was watching, and that ultimately made me lose sight of what little narrative was in place. At the end of things, I felt hopeful despite an encroaching darkness, but I really wasn’t sure why. Perhaps that’s what Amir and his subjects feel. In the face of logic, they’d be as grim as their sometimes suffocating circumstances, but they strive on anyhow. Perhaps we’re to do the same while watching Pumkin Little, but this reviewer wanted more logic and less arthouse. It’s desirable to leave and still think about a movie you’ve seen, but to have to try so hard to make sense of a movie while it’s going on that you feel you’ve missed half the movie… well maybe that’s okay for Godard, Stipe and Motlagh, but it doesn’t work for me.

Two stars

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