White Light 9
by Gertjan Zuilhof
In compiling the White Light programme, I have limited myself to those films that are entirely about drugs or their consequences. Positive or negative consequences. Serious or satirical. Real or unreal. Sombre or cheerful. Everything was welcome.
But films are not always about only one thing. Sometimes they forget where they started or they end up were they did not expect to. Take the Uruguayan Tiger candidate La Perrera (The Dog Pound) by Manuel Nieto Zas. No description indicates that locally grown marijuana plays an important role in it. Maybe because it’s as common as home distilled hooch in a Russian comedy. It’s just there. It’s used. And yes, it shapes the mood. Basically protagonist David in La Perrera would rather continue studying in the city and do his exams. But he doesn’t put up much real resistance when his father sends him to a remote coastal town to build his own house. The town is empty and listless. A few forgotten men. No women. There are lots of dogs. Apart from the cannabis dealer, no one seems to be involved in any economic activity. David smokes his joint in the evening under the stars and seems to have come to terms with everything that overcomes him. That’s not how the film ends up, but that’s a different story.
Tideland by Terry Gilliam starts as the ultimate absurdist drugs comedy. A wild surreal story about the Alice-in-Wonderland-like Jeliza-Rose who is still only 10. A precocious girl who looks after her rundown and addicted hippie parents. She diligently boils their syringes for their excessive heroin use. The bed-ridden yet still occasionally hysterical mother is the first to die of an overdose. The young girl’s father, rock guitarist Noah (played with suitably greasy style by Jeff Bridges), sets off immediately after the death of his wife with Jeliza-Rose for his home territory. A fictional countryside (filmed in the Canadian wilds of Saskatchewan) where Gilliam’s chaotic fantasies were reconstructed (and then blown up again). Maybe Bridges was only contracted for a brief period, in any case he dies soon after arriving on one of his small vacations, as he calls his drug highs. Jeliza-Roze cannot accept his death and so her father continues to play a silent role in the film for a long time as a rotting corpse. Drugs no longer play a role in the film, but the madness is still everywhere. Jeliza-Roze gets to know the crazy Dickens who certainly doesn’t need drugs to live in a different world.
From Dickens it’s only a minor step to James. James is the totally disturbed son of the less obviously disturbed Brockleband couple. Lord and Lady Brocklebank. Very old and very rundown aristocracy. They are the protagonists in the film The Living and the Dead by Simon Rumley. In the original production information, the film had the even more intriguing but less catchy title The Living In The Home Of The Dead. The home is an immeasurable yet bare, empty and derelict mansion. It’s been a very long time since a sparkling masked ball took place here or a hunt was concluded with the very best wine. It’s very possible that the whole house and its foolish family only live on in the mind of the last survivor, because reality is on several levels here and a very realistic one probably isn’t one of them. Anyway. In the story within the story, James heads for the medicine cabinet every morning for his vast daily dose. And then he still has the jitters. Or maybe he gets the jitters. The film doesn’t answer that question. Even when he grabs the syringe of morphine, he seems to want to get out of a high rather than into one. It seems as if the film is about insanity and combating it with legally prescribed drugs. But we don’t see a doctor and the nurse who has to look after the sick mother is locked out. James takes care of the medicine cabinet himself.
The Living And The Dead is a film in the tradition of existentialist absurd theatre. Ionesco. Beckett. But also, as Rumley himself indicated, of the existentialist-absurd film making of Darren Aronofsky or a darker variation on Terry Gilliam.
The films by Nieto Zas, Gilliam and Rumley are not being screened within the White Light programme section. In the case of Nieto Zas that would not have been a good idea and in the case of Rumley it would have been just fine.
But, as I said, films are often not only about one thing. Or not in one way about a certain thing. That is why films, certainly good and opulent films, sometimes just feared in or just don’t fit into a thematic programme. A thematic programme that, after all, only puts a number of films like cheering schoolkids into a class for a limited period and then the lets them go back out to play again.