All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, Jean-Luc Godard said, stealing/borrowing an axiom first coined by DW Griffith. What, even to make a multiverse movie?
When Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness started being eclipsed by Everything Everywhere All at Once last year, Jamie Lee Curtis was all over the twittersphere saying how proud she was of their ālittle movieā, which was made for a fraction of the Dr Strange budget.
Remember those posts as you watch Backwards Faces, a debut movie by director/writer/producer/editor/publicist Chris Aresco which somehow wrangles a multiverse movie out of a girl, a gun, a guy and a single room. Shot in black and white and with no special effects, itās not just a remarkable achievement but a fantastic film, ingenious, smart, funny, fast-moving and ingenious (it’s worth saying twice).
The set-up is super unpromising. A young woman called Sydney and a young man called Ken are sitting back to back in a room on a bed. Sex has been had. It has not been good. Ken, it seems has shortcomings, or short comings to be more specific. Sydney had kind of hoped for more from this one night hook-up. Ken is still hoping for more ā he likes her.
Which is probably what prompts him to make a vainglorious boast about having written the screenplay to a film they both know. Sydney asks him if his name is on the credits. Not as such, Ken replies, because the guy who wrote it got the idea off me. What, the exact literal idea, she asks. Well, kind of, he continues, continuing to dig himself into a hole.
And then, sensing he needs to say something to save the situation, Ken goes for a bigger claim. That bathroom of mine, he says, is actually a portal into a multiverse of infinite worlds, where every possible version of you and I work through the endless consequences of our every thought and action.
In one of these multiverses, Ken goes on, you arenāt the university student who has recently been caught cheating and is now in big trouble. Sydney had forgotten she’d told Ken about that.
As Sydney makes to escape from this weirdo who knows more than he should, Ken enters the bathroom and comes out a different Ken, or so he says, in a dressing gown given to him by Sydney’s mother. This is news to Sydney. As is the revelation that this Ken has been in a relationship with another version of Sydney for some years.
Traversable wormholes do indeed exist in Kenās bathroom, or they do in this brilliantly ingenious (third time) film, a screwball comedy of smart writing and smart delivery. Iām tempted to reach for the name of Woody Allen, and then I hesitate, remembering that in this universe this isnāt quite the accolade it once was. But Allen is the right direction to be reaching, because Arescoās screenplay is clever and it ranges wide ā from entropy and relativity to Schrƶdingerās cat, concepts of right and wrong, personal accountability and masturbation. From the the deep to the flippant and back again.
In a film segmented off into discrete chunks, itās the burbling synth score of Nathaniel Meeks that marks off the episodes. It becomes increasingly important as versions of Sydney and Ken negotiate the logic of their situation (in other words, Iām not giving away any more plot).
That score really adds a counterpoint to the austerity of DP Jake Gorrās simple, clean and matt-finish shooting style, adding ambient film-making lushness. Aresco borrows comedic ideas from all over the place, including the likes of Airplane! and Abbott and Costello and relies on his performers to get the rapid-fire deadpan delivery right. Actors Andrew Morra and Lennon Sickels come at the screenplay like table tennis players, shooting dialogue back and forth over the net.
Er, thatās all ā a great idea, done extremely well, with ideas, jokes, likeable performances. Itās not big but it is clever. Donāt expect Multiverses of Madness or Everything Everywheres and you might like it as much as I did.
Backwards Faces ā Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
Ā© Steve Morrissey 2023