There's a scene in writer/director/one-time enfant terrible Harmony Korine's new film Mister Lonely in which a herd of sick mutton have to be exterminated. Those of us who not-too-fondly recall the cat-flaying scenes of Gummo have good reason to squirm at just the notion, and expect Korine to show the slaughter full-on. But in this picture — his first feature since 1999's understated Dogme 95 exercise Julien Donkey-Boy — Korine keeps the animal slaughter discreetly off-screen. Is it because there are a bunch of name actors in this thing — Samantha Morton, Diego Luna, James freakin' Fox for heaven's sake — nd that Korine had read about John C. Reilly walking off the Manderlay set on account of a real donkey killing in the film, and subsequently got spooked?
Not necessarily. I like to think Korine, who, love his work or hate it, has proven himself as a genuinely sincere cinematic artist of a type, is just making better choices all around. Which is not to say that Mister Lonely isn't one whacked-out piece of cinema.
Made up of four segments, each named after a Michael Jackson song (and not in a particularly apposite manner; "Thriller," for instance, isn't, although initial seg "Man in the Mirror" is a good generic hook for a protagonist's intro I suppose), Mister Lonely begins with a Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Diego Luna, entertaining a Parisian old-age home, along with Marilyn Monroe impersonator Samantha Morton. If you are familiar with the physical appearances of Mr. Luna and the newly zaftig Ms. Morton, you will immediately deduce that these two would not make particularly effective Michael Jackson and Marilyn Monroe impersonators. You don't get it? You got it.
Marilyn spirits MJ to a castle in Scotland populated by a commune of similarly ineffectual impersonators, including Marilyn's husband "Charlie Chaplin" (Denis Lavant), who is abusive to Marilyn in a way that at one point explicitly recalls Karlheinz Böhm's sadistic treatment of Margit Carstensen in Fassbinder's 1974 Martha. The more allusively-inclined members of the audience who catch this will latch on to Mister Lonely as Korine's experiment in the extremes of bathos, even as the picture tries to propose itself as a comedy of sorts. What with its chicken-worshipping Buckwheat impersonator, swear-a-blue-streak Abe Lincoln impersonator, and The Queen and The Pope impersonated by Anita freakin' Pallenberg and the aforementioned James freakin' Fox, for heaven's sake — Korine told me he was keen to reunite this couple from Cammell and Roeg's Performance — the hilarity is certainly of a rarified sort. Intercut with their story is the most elaborate flying nun joke ever concocted, starring Werner Herzog.
What to make of it all? Hard to say. Just to take in the fact that its soundtrack is made up of music by both J. Spaceman and Sun City Girls is to understand that this is a picture that's divided against itself in a way that's perhaps too hermetic to be comprehended. After one of the film's Cannes screenings last year someone older and wiser than me was heard to remark, "Here in Europe, you can get someone to finance something like this with no problem; 3 million Euros, it's yours. And it's certain to get selected by a Cannes committee, a Venice committee. In the meantime, it's not anything that a couple in the 20th arrondissement, or on 68th Street in Manhattan for that matter, would ever pay ten dollars to see. Or put a penny into its production." Lest you think he was ranting, he pronounced all this with a wry smile. And why not? As for your ten dollars, well I'm not gonna tell you how to spend them.
READ MORE: Mister Lonely interview
VIEW PHOTOS: Toronto Film Festival 2007 portraits
