Whew. That’s about the only adequate response after watching Upstream Color, the new film from Shane Carruth. Carruth, whose debut film Primer remains an unparalleled piece of indie sci fi (and the most consistent time travel film ever made), goes leaps beyond that film with his second effort. Diving into ideas of the subconscious, memory, and connection between minds, the film conveys its themes in an impressionistic style, presenting an enthralling glimpse of the potential for cinema to portray the inner life of the mind.
Upstream Color tells the story of two people who find each other after both are mysteriously drugged with hallucinogenic worms – their lives destroyed in the process – and “wake up” with little cognizance of what has happened to them. They cling to each other as they puzzle out the wrongs done against them. At the center of the mystery lie two men, The Thief and The Sampler, but their roles remain unclear through much of the film. Other mysteries abound. Why do the protagonists seem to share thoughts and memories? Why does the woman have the words of Thoreau’s Walden so memorized that they seem a part of her very existence? What exactly is the nature of the connection between the humans and the pigs that receive the worms once they are removed from a human’s system?
I actually think, on one level, that some of these questions have fairly straightforward answers. On an intellectual level the film is not nearly as complex as Primer, which featured circles within circles of time travel. I have, if not 100% provable answers, at least guesses that I feel good about. But to answer them would be to defeat the point of the movie entirely. Many reviews of the film (such as Kenneth Turan’s for the LA Times) have brought up the idea that Carruth wants the audience to feel the film much more than think about it. In its own way it is no less puzzling than Primer, but the mystery exists on a much more metaphysical level – not a math problem to be solved, but a paradox to be embraced. Subjectivity of perception lies at the heart of the film, so the audience must embrace and enter the film’s world, swimming upstream like the worms that inch their way through veins and arteries.
Thus the film’s preoccupation with memory. In one of the most arresting sequences, Kris and Jeff (our protagonists) argue back and forth about whose childhood memories belong to whom. Their arguments swirl around and around because their memories seem to have pooled together, a big collective from which either may draw. The altering of memory is, of course, a fairly standard theme in works of fiction (and non-fiction – the single greatest treatment of the subject lies in Augustine’s Confessions). Unlike many sci-fi works, though, where the altering is viewed as a means for sinister forces to tamper with a person’s autonomy, Upstream Color chooses to leave the tampering in the background, instead narrowing in on the personal experience involved in remembrance and misremembrance. Images float by, repeat, get hazy. It is a wondrous feat of subjective film making.
Speaking of film making, this seems like the appropriate place to break and acknowledge how much Carruth has grown as a director in the past nine years. Like Primer, Upstream Color exists only because Carruth willed it to be so: he serves here as writer, director, actor, editor, and scorer. Unlike his previous labor of love, though, this new film shows him in full command of his techniques. Granted, a larger budget surely had something to do with the difference in quality (Primer was quite famously shot for the unthinkable sum of $7,000, and it shows) but his directorial and editing choices seem more guided with this film. There is still a mild issue in the sound mixing (probably my biggest complaint about his first film), but even that is miles beyond Primer. The two films share a murky aesthetic, muted colors punctuated by bright light, but the palette works brilliantly for this story of the haziness of memory. Carruth includes some incredible shots, including haunting images of long hallways (a great visual metaphor for memory) and glimpses of the human body at work. Though not quite as strong an actor as he is a director, Carruth still holds his own in front of the camera, but the film belongs to the masterful performance by Amy Seimetz as Kris, who twitches through an unnerving role and makes you really believe the old cliche that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
In some ways I feel useless trying to describe this movie. How do you tell somebody about Picasso’s Guernica? Or the book of Ecclesiastes? Or Brahms’ 4th Symphony? I am not saying I am ready to slide Upstream Color into the canon next to those seminal works, but I do know this: it is something that must be leaped into to be appreciated. Much like Kierkegaard’s view of faith, it is incomprehensible from the outside; it must be swum through. I also know this, that works I consider truly great stay with me and infest my mind. Who knows how long it will crawl through my bloodstream, but I already plan to see Upstream Color again, and I am fairly certain it will be simmering in my mind until I do.
Image may be NSFW.
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