Film Review: "Primer" (dir: Shane Carruth)
This review first appeared on the Culture Wars website
Like a bolt of lightning from an otherwise clear sky, Primer touched down at last year’s Sundance film festival and quickly became the event’s talking point. The pet project of Shane Carruth – who, as well as starring, wrote, directed, composed the score - Primer subjects its audience to a tortuously exacting seventy minutes in which the conventions of the science-fiction film are torn up, swallowed, regurgitated and then torn up again. Not for the short of attention, Primer nonetheless rewards the patient viewer with an intriguing examination of time travel and its discontents. It is a singular achievement, one that renders the complexities of films such as Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko and Memento as mentally taxing as Disney. Unlike those carefully plotted films, Primer cares little whether or not it takes its audience along for the ride.
The film centres on two engineers, Abe and Aaron, who work in dull assembly plants by day, but reserve their enthusiasm for a garage-bound project whose properties appear to be connected with a new type of cooling device. The film’s first twenty minutes are a blinding miasma of scientific vernacular surely of interest only to the most dedicated of PhD students, yet the effect is to inculcate the audience into the film’s pared-down naturalistic style. Its low-key aesthetics – the film was shot for a reputed cost of just $7,000 – and the barely nuanced performances from the key actors, make the twists and narrative backflips to come all the more powerful.
By trial-and-error, the duo realise that the machine has an unexpected property – the ability to bend space in such a way that time travel becomes possible. Rendering a full-sized device in a local self-storage locker, the friends manage to drag themselves backwards to an earlier point in the day. The verisimilitude of this experience – the banality of the scene, its lack of effect or dramatic music - add to the quirky plausibility that inflects the entire film. With the device’s properties established, the friends’ thoughts turn to moneymaking, petty revenge and, finally, a bizarre attempt to prevent an altercation at a party.
To give away how exactly this unfolds would be churlish and also difficult, as – on just the one viewing – I confess I was lost by the film’s end. Suffice it to say that from hereon in the plot becomes increasingly thick, as the pitfalls and temptations of rudimentary time travel are picked over mercilessly. By taking to heart one of the complexities of time travel – namely, the idea that by moving through time you are creating endless facsimiles of yourself – the film ends up resembling the Escher print of two hands drawing each other; it becomes increasingly difficult to follow which ‘copy’ is which. The film does demand a lot of the viewer, and even the most attentive is unlikely to grasp the implications first time round, but nonetheless as the plot unravels everything comes into question until the very foundations on which the film is built are ripped asunder. Primer is the kind of intelligent film that so rarely appears in American cinema, and is all the more refreshing because of it.
Like a bolt of lightning from an otherwise clear sky, Primer touched down at last year’s Sundance film festival and quickly became the event’s talking point. The pet project of Shane Carruth – who, as well as starring, wrote, directed, composed the score - Primer subjects its audience to a tortuously exacting seventy minutes in which the conventions of the science-fiction film are torn up, swallowed, regurgitated and then torn up again. Not for the short of attention, Primer nonetheless rewards the patient viewer with an intriguing examination of time travel and its discontents. It is a singular achievement, one that renders the complexities of films such as Mulholland Drive, Donnie Darko and Memento as mentally taxing as Disney. Unlike those carefully plotted films, Primer cares little whether or not it takes its audience along for the ride.
The film centres on two engineers, Abe and Aaron, who work in dull assembly plants by day, but reserve their enthusiasm for a garage-bound project whose properties appear to be connected with a new type of cooling device. The film’s first twenty minutes are a blinding miasma of scientific vernacular surely of interest only to the most dedicated of PhD students, yet the effect is to inculcate the audience into the film’s pared-down naturalistic style. Its low-key aesthetics – the film was shot for a reputed cost of just $7,000 – and the barely nuanced performances from the key actors, make the twists and narrative backflips to come all the more powerful.
By trial-and-error, the duo realise that the machine has an unexpected property – the ability to bend space in such a way that time travel becomes possible. Rendering a full-sized device in a local self-storage locker, the friends manage to drag themselves backwards to an earlier point in the day. The verisimilitude of this experience – the banality of the scene, its lack of effect or dramatic music - add to the quirky plausibility that inflects the entire film. With the device’s properties established, the friends’ thoughts turn to moneymaking, petty revenge and, finally, a bizarre attempt to prevent an altercation at a party.
To give away how exactly this unfolds would be churlish and also difficult, as – on just the one viewing – I confess I was lost by the film’s end. Suffice it to say that from hereon in the plot becomes increasingly thick, as the pitfalls and temptations of rudimentary time travel are picked over mercilessly. By taking to heart one of the complexities of time travel – namely, the idea that by moving through time you are creating endless facsimiles of yourself – the film ends up resembling the Escher print of two hands drawing each other; it becomes increasingly difficult to follow which ‘copy’ is which. The film does demand a lot of the viewer, and even the most attentive is unlikely to grasp the implications first time round, but nonetheless as the plot unravels everything comes into question until the very foundations on which the film is built are ripped asunder. Primer is the kind of intelligent film that so rarely appears in American cinema, and is all the more refreshing because of it.
posted by DN at 10:18 AM
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