The Trouble With Laurence Miller . . .
Swift shot: A complex, challenging to follow film about an insurance claim with too many players and one very fortunate beneficiary. This is a real street film, Brooklyn style, raw, gritty, and all shot under 10k, the way an indie should be, a bunch of hipsters sitting around the proverbial campfire and saying, shit, we could make a film, it might not be the best thing to hit the market, but we’re putting it out there, people need to see the way things really are! If people don’t like it – fuck ’em, it’s guerrilla shit! I respect that kind of attitude, and I love getting films like this, totally out of the blue from a film-maker that has more passion than scratch, typically they have to get more creative. This film’s creator (in every sense), Pascal Santschi, sent me an email, and five days later I was trying to get my limited brain-power around the jig-saw that is The Arriviste. Hell, I had to look that word up, because I was too busy ogling my ingenue French élève-enseignant, (the lovely Mademoiselle Leger) the day she was telling us what the hell arriviste meant back in high school.
Starting right out with violence, score one for that alone, The Arriviste focuses on two brothers, a body, or a few, an old dying man, a killer, a nurse, a street-freak (bottle of Windex and all) and one would-be author trying to get a big break blowing the lid off the whole thing. The story was knitted together well, but I must confess it took me two viewings to really connect all the dots and understand all the players’ motives. The story was interesting enough to keep me wondering how it was all going to play out in the end, and I could watch it twice without it getting tedious, and in fact I enjoyed it more the second time around.
Our “hero,” Nick is a real dirt-bag, the kind of guy who would punch a toddler to steal his candy money, he is on parole, or probation, for something, it isn’t ever explained, but it really doesn’t need to be . . . it’s clear right away that he isn’t a saint. Because he only has a few days left on his parole, he is staying close to home, trying to stay out of trouble and then he gets an odd note from his brother, something about hanging low for a bit and that some people are going to be looking for him. Sure enough, a lot of people do – they are looking for his body! Nick is no genius, but he manages to outwit a few half-wits and even dispatches one clown with that ancient Chinese martial-art, WonDomShit – translation, man who stab self with own knife.
As Nick follows the trail and gets more deep into the puzzle, more peril pursues him, and while you aren’t ever really rooting for him, you just want to see what the hell is so important to everyone about this body and all the trouble it is causing.
At iRATEfilms we are a lot like Pascal, we run the site out of love for films, and because we got tired of listening to so-called “critics” spout pompous remarks about foreign films we just OH so have to see so that we can grow as a society. Bag that, sometimes you just want to be entertained, and The Arriviste is like that too, an unruly mob of film-makers that might not always give you the refined quality you expect from Hollyweird, but they don’t really give a shit if you like it or not, to them it is about getting it out there, creating something that is a part of their scene. And, I get it, when I watched the night exterior shots, done by a hand-held that looked like a dark pointillist piece, it hit me, it’s all street, all the time, and it’s a story that could easily be right out of the Brooklyn Paper!
Eamon Speer as the lead role of Nick deserves the only real acting nod, no one else stood out much. Speer has a lot of scenes where he has no dialog, his motives are hidden, but that actually adds to his performance. Actors will tell you, it’s easy to act when you are speaking and doing, but acting like you are thinking is the hardest trick to pull off. I think, and this is more a style note than anything else, but I think that having a narrator give us a few clues as to what Nick was thinking in each scene, even just as a little head’s up here and there, might have helped a lot. Something like Goodfellas meets Bogey, but with a Brooklyn edge, maybe having no “other” was by design, and I must admit, it was a unique element for me, so on that level it was gutsy.
Like it or hate it, The Arriviste is a good, dark crime film with a slight edge you won’t find in the theaters. What impressed me the most though, is that Pascal has no formal training, yet he grasped concepts like framing, point of view, weaving everything together and some really interesting camera angles – and if this is what he can do with less than 10k and no training, if he sticks with film, I will have the rare honor to say, “Yea, I knew Pascal before he went all Hollywood . . . shit, he even mailed me a copy of The Arriviste before it went world-wide.” Yes, I think I very much look forward to his next work. Two words, Pascal – Hell Yes!
The Arriviste hits the streets world-wide today, March 28, you won’t be able to get a slick copy with your name on it, but if you know where to look, on the street, you just may be able to grab it up.
