In Upstream Color, a man and woman whose lives have been destroyed by some blue stuff attempt to regain control of their lives by defeating the foley artist who keeps pigs.

Overall rating: 1 out of 4

Here’s the catalog copy for this film:

Kris is derailed from her life when she is drugged by a small-time thief. But something bigger is going on. She is unknowingly drawn into the life cycle of a presence that permeates the microscopic world, moving to nematodes, plant life, livestock, and back again. Along the way, she finds another being – a familiar, who is equally consumed by the larger force. The two search urgently for a place of safety within each other as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of their wrecked lives.

What’s supported by the film itself: the woman’s name is Kris. She meets a guy whose name we never know. The rest of the catalog synopsis came from the director’s mind and went onto the catalog page without ever touching the film itself. The catalog also says “With its muscular cinematic language rooted in the powerful yearnings felt before words can be formed, Upstream Color is entirely original, mythic, romantic…” well, there’s more, but it’s equally bullshit.

The director did get up before the film, but all he said was that he would be back up at the end of the film to apologize for it. The audience laughed, but the joke was entirely on us. I left before the Q&A after the film, so I didn’t get to hear any of his justification for a film that had both the Pirate and I asking “What just happened?” as we walked out of the theater.

It made me think about a couple of lectures I attended at the last grad school residency where we talked about the rules of writing that we have all heard, and when it’s right to break them. The thing I kept thinking is that this film was 100% show with 0% tell, which meant that there were a whole lot of places where something was happening, but the audience couldn’t figure out what the hell it was. If the filmmaker (who wrote, directed, produced, starred in, edited and did cinematography and music) had deigned to just TELL us what he was thinking, the way he did in the catalog blurb, it would have been a much better film.