Video review

Upstream Color (2013)

Rated PG-13

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What a delicate film this is.

To be sure, weighty and absurd ideas are stacked upon each other, scene by scene, but underneath is a foundation so delicate you wonder how it can support this film. And yet it does.

OK, here we go: Women pick blue flowers growing near a great tree on a riverbank. A shady fellow buys these flowers and harvests grub worms from the soil of the plants. A chemical is extracted from the worms to create a potent drug that, depending on how you use it, can place you in synchronicity with the environment, can link your mind with that of another person who’s also on the drug, or can be wielded as an instrument of mind control.

The opening segments befuddle and intrigue as we observe—with sparse dialogue and music—the man as he worm-drugs a woman named Kris, takes her back to her own home and through mind control (and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden) encourages her to empty her bank accounts and give up personal belongings. He keeps her in this fugue, compliant state (for days? weeks?) while he bleeds her dry. Finally he packs up and leaves. Kris slowly comes back to what was once her reality starved, bruised, confused, jobless, penniless, shattered. Her world no longer makes sense, her mind and emotions are altered in a way that encourages viewers to acknowledge that reality can sometimes be a fragile, fleeting idea.

Just as we’re wrapping our minds around this segment, we’re introduced to a musician/pig farmer, credited as The Sampler, who calls Kris to him using his sound-recording devices like a pied piper. The Sampler removes a now much-larger worm from Kris and implants it into one of his pigs. From time to time the man tosses piglets into the river, which then float downstream to our tree from the beginning, where the piglets rot, freeing the worms from within, which become nutrients for the magic flowers the women come to pick.

Got that? We’re witnessing a life cycle, which Kris and many other unwitting victims—and their corresponding pigs!—are now a part of.

Another such victim is Jeff, who is drawn to Kris, perhaps because his pig couples with Kris’ pig back on the farm. They are two mind-scattered peas in a pod who can’t even discern whose memory is whose, even as they piece together the riddle of their lives, and fall in love.

You think I’ve told you too much of the plot; I think I’ve done you a favor. It took three viewings to piece this much together, as the story is told out of sequence, in fragments and largely with only sound and subtle cutting between related images, as dialogue is kept to a minimum. (The last 20 minutes, all the way to the credits, are dialogue-free.)

I think the director (Shane Carruth, whose debut microbudget, mind-frying time-travel flick Primer set the indie world on fire in 2004) wants to immerse the viewer in a sonic, wispy-image experience that approximates Kris and Jeff’s shattered and reforming mindsets. And maybe this approximates our truest selves: how we are merely a collection of our selective memories, which we figuratively hold tightly in our hands like a bunch of cards. This movie is about what happens when someone or something swats those cards to the ground and we have to pick them up again. I think that’s the foundation of this film.

I don’t know if I understood everything going on here, but this I know: I worked up quite a bit of empathy for Kris and Jeff’s plight and was deeply moved as I reflected that emotions and motives are still powerful even when untethered from the sanity of everyday life. By the finale, I found myself very satisfied by an ending that isn’t really as happy as it seems, once you think about it.

For days after I saw this it swam in my mind like a magical worm upending my notions of a conventional narrative love story.

| Marvin Brown’s Movie Review Archive