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Originally Posted by Frankie Teardrop  UPSTREAM COLOR - On with the good stuff. Wow, this was amazing. And just really baffling. Or maybe not, because it makes sense on some distant level. Reviewers have tended to put a kind of 'T Malick meets D Conenberg' type framework around it, which probably works. Basically, it's about a woman who is kidnapped by a man who inserts some kind of consciousness altering maggot into her, subjects her to some heavy psychological abuse, then uses her in a financial scam. He then passes on the psych-maggot to an avant-garde musician / swineherd who likes to infiltrate his livestock with said maggots which I guess imbue the pigs with some form of telepathic consciousness... the film follows the woman as she meets a man who has been through to the same process - both try to come to terms / understand what has happened. Yep, it's a bit of a mind-blower, although, as you sink into it, you adapt to its otherness quickly. It has narrative, obviously, but, cinematically we're in indie-experiental territory - it's not linear, and pushes forward by way of connections, parallels, intersections. Judging by the DVD box it's been marketed in the UK as a standard horror sci-fi thriller - it isn't at all, and such a move will only alienate those who can't put up with something so fiercely enigmatic. An odd move also, as the film has been extensively covered by the vessels of middlebrow culture - The Guardian, Sight and Sound etc. Anyway, if you like it strange then hopefully you'll love this elliptical piece of arch-weirdness. |
I loved
Upstream Color. Loved it. And although I couldn't even pretend to understand the majority of it, I found it really easy to like and go along with, which can't be said of all films which are as atypical or fall under the avant-garde - a credit to Carruth, really. I accepted it as a stream of conciousness, but there is some sort of twisted sense to its extra-sensory threads, as well as a good old fashioned love story to hang on to. I gained more from readers of the film than what Carruth himself has actually said about it - he's (I assume deliberately) vague on what it's all about. Either way, I fell for its hypnotic quality and found it a far more substantial film than (the still rather excellent)
Primer. I think the comparisons to Malick on a visual front are certainly accurate as are the Cronenberg nods, and that's how I somewhat flippantly described the film to my girlfriend after watching it (while waxing lyrical over its utter strangeness).