- If ever there was an up-and-coming director whose career didn't need an early experimental phase, it was Shane Carruth. His first feature film, Primer, worked both because it was novel and because the audience naturally assumed that the writers knew what was going on even if they didn't. It also clearly demonstrated that this was a director who could hold a confused audience rapt, which is a rare talent indeed. But now we have Upstream Color, which plays like a pig enthusiast's 96-minute schizophrenic episode. In my experience, you can jerk the audience around for about half an hour. Any more than that and they start to rebel.
- Upstream Color probably contains a story, but I'm not sure I could describe it with any accuracy. Maybe I'll have more success with the characters. There's a guy (Thiago Martins) who puts mind-controlling worms in people, presumably to steal their money. There's a woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) who falls victim to this man and wakes up with a bad case of amnesia. There's also a pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig) who moonlights as a foley artist and pig-human vivisectionist. Finally, there's a man named Jeff (Carruth) who inexplicably falls in love with Kris. The film implies that reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden helps its characters to gain some perspective, but I didn't have a copy handy and totally got lost.
- Let me speak plainly. Shane Carruth is a skilled director obviously capable of creating interesting and great-looking films. So far, his films have featured excellent use of color, and he's clearly not afraid to tackle original stories. This film, however, was basically a lot of confusion and mucking around with worms and pigs. On second thought, the most offensive element of the film was actually the suggestion that Kris and Jeff could fall in love since both characters have such repellent emotional problems. On a positive note, I intend to coin the phrase "drowning the pig" to describe a talented director who officially crosses over into making inscrutable avant-garde pigshit festival bait. The pig's in the bag, and the bag's in the river.
