Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section.
We are always performing. That is one of many truths expressed by the films of American documentarian Robert Greene, whose work for the past couple of decades has explored the thin line between fiction and reality. Too Much Sugar, his latest, premiering at the Venice Film Festival, takes that idea even further. Made in collaboration with Ryan “Holli-wood” Holliger, a carpenter from smalltown Missouri whom Greene met when their kids played on the same basketball team, the film follows Holliger and his best friend’s families as they make their dream movies — shorts that reveal their fantasies, their regrets, the way they wish things could be.
That’s too dry a description, though. Too Much Sugar isn’t so much an omnibus as it is a frenzied ever-changing tapestry, one in which we don’t always know what we’re watching. We might see Holliger yelling instructions to his son as he teaches him how to punch; a few minutes later, we see the son doing the same to Holliger, a role reversal for the movie they’re making. Elsewhere, a realistic fight breaks out — until someone yells cut. Pretend tears become real tears. The movies these people make have one foot in genre and another in the awful truth. One kid wants to make a supernatural fantasy, another a gangster movie, another a boxing movie. Holliger’s mom, diagnosed with breast cancer, wants to make a horror movie about her cancer, called Die Cancer, Die! Holliger’s closest friend, Michael “AccRite” Midgyett, mired in grief after losing his 16-year-old son DeQiran to a random shooting at a house party, makes a movie in which he gets his son to leave the party before the bullets start flying, thus creating something that is at once a redemptive fantasy and a reassertion of unspeakable tragedy.
Holliger and AccRite have both been behind bars, and they still contend with the ghosts of the past. Holliger, who never knew his father, has had six kids with five different women, a fact he repeats several times, almost like it could be a boast. Some kids he’s always been close to, others he’s had to slowly build relationships with. One son, Gavin, now 27, tells us that he didn’t know who Holliger was when he started showing up at his baseball games. (When asked what his dream movie would be, Gavin says he doesn’t really have one, that he doesn’t really see a future for himself.) When AccRite went to prison, he wound up at the same institution as his father, also a convict.
Greene’s film interweaves scenes from the family’s movies, footage of them being filmed, moments from real life, interviews; watching Too Much Sugar is like being rolled around inside a kaleidoscope of documentary images. (It could have been called Too Much Movie.) The film slips in and out of reality, following a kind of dream logic that often disarms and disorients us. As a result, when the real emotional fireworks arrive — and they absolutely do arrive — we are left devastated.
In his early films, Greene observed individuals who took on different, sometimes contradictory roles in their lives. I’ve banged on long enough in the past about his masterpiece, Actress, which followed actress Brandy Burre as she tried to restart her career after stepping away from showbiz to start a family. Over the past decade or so, however, as his profile has risen, Greene’s ambition has expanded, too. His work has taken on a collective dimension, in which he makes movies about ordinary people making films and staging spectacles as a way of confronting traumatic pasts. In Bisbee ’17, the town of Bisbee, Arizona restaged a brutal roundup of workers that took place in 1917. In Procession, a group of men who had been sexually assaulted as children by priests made a series of shorts about their experiences. The people Greene makes films about look to reassert control over their realities and thus perhaps move forward. In Too Much Sugar, he’s found a perfect embodiment of the moving image’s power to help us dream and survive together.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.
Source: Read the original article on www.vulture.com
Written by https://futureknowledge.in/
