Image courtsey of Harmony Korine's official Web site
Harmony Korine’s best film yet
Diego Luna plays a Michael Jackson impersonator in Mister Lonely
By Jonathan Reiss
Published: March 21st, 2008 | 1:11pm
If there’s one thing that defines director Harmony Korine (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy), it’s his dedication to cinema as an art form and his eagerness to break rules. For instance, Korine followed innocent passers-by with a camera, trying to provoke them with fisticuffs for a film called Fight Harm, which he started working on in 1999. Fortunately — or unfortunately -— the film was stopped when Korine was hospitalized and sentenced to jail time. Such antics perfectly represent his M.O. as a filmmaker.
As was the case with Gummo (1997), Korine often assumes, wrongly, that shoving his camera in the face of the bizarre and disenfranchised will translate into a great film. Therein lies the difference between him and his predecessor, Larry Clark (Kids, Bully, Wassup Rockers). In Clark's fascination with wayward youth, it’s clear that he has a true reverence for his subjects. While Clark's films are love letters to his subjects, Korine's movies play out like surveillance footage intended for prosecution — although screenplays penned by Korine, but with Clark in the director's chair, have made excellent films (Kids, Ken Park).
However, Korine's previous films and screenplays were directed and written when Korine was in his early 20s. Now 35, Korine's newest release, Mister Lonely, suggests that a touch of age and experience are all that Korine needed to fully bloom as a filmmaker.
Mister Lonely is the story of a Michael Jackson impersonator, played by Y Tu Mamá También lead Diego Luna. He goes through life alone in Paris until meeting a Marilyn Monroe impersonator working at a nursing home (played by Samantha Morton). She invites him to a communal island where she lives with a gang of other impersonators, including Abraham Lincoln, Little Red Riding Hood, Buckwheat, the Queen of England, James Dean, Madonna, all Three Stooges, and Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn's husband.
This narrative setup brings with it Korine's penchant for off-putting and, at times, harrowing, imagery, interspersed with the surreal. There are scenes, such as when the hysterical young Buckwheat parades through the woods riding a donkey in celebration of breasts (“I love women’s breastsssss, they make me hot!”) that are unforgettable.
Growing up on a commune outside Los Angeles, Korine has found the personal connection he needed to make an emotionally charged film. While he strays from classical narrative structure, juxtaposing realist elements with beguiling clips of nuns falling out of planes, Korine still embraces a greater degree of normalcy in the structure of
Mister Lonely than in his previous works.
Morton's exquisite acting coupled with a rich and compelling plot and Korine's offbeat style makes Mister Lonely his best film yet and a throwback to a time when indie film was still exciting.
Issue #35
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