LOREN CASS
Edited, Written, directed by Chris Fuller
Produced by Frank Craft, Fuller & Kayla Tabish
Released by Kino International
USA. 83 min. Not Rated
With Kayla Tabish, Travis Maynard, Lewis Brogan, Jacob Reynolds, Mike Glausier & Din Thomas
 

Writer and director Chris Fuller’s 2007 tale of American anomie and violence is a mess. Evocatively shot on 16 millimeter, Loren Cass feels like a hangover from the early nineties. It features a cast of young unknowns self-consciously non-acting as they drink, drug, brawl, and mope through static, artsy long takes of inarticulate misery.

Set in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1997, the picture tries to capture some of the city’s anxiety after riots tore through it, sparked by a white cop’s shooting of an unarmed black teenager. But in the film’s typically oblique and disjointed manner, it only suggests this history by sometimes flashing archival footage of burning cars and cordons of riot cops. Unless you’ve read the production notes or lived in St. Petersburg 10 years ago, these disturbing images will mean nothing.

More of a tone poem than a straight story, Loren Cass features immaculately composed scenes, which slowly—and I mean slowly—reveal the lives of three troubled youths. Auto mechanic Cale (played by Fuller under the pseudonym Lewis Brogan) shares a few nearly wordless meals with Nicole, a sex-loving waitress (Kayla Tabish). As their sort-of romance sort of blossoms, Cale’s friend Jason (Travis Maynard) smothers his shifting anxieties and hatreds in an all-American quilt of alcohol, pills, and aimless aggression. But to enjoy these slices of life requires enduring a soundtrack full of macho posturing from Charles Bukowski and a pan-African nationalist. And worse, in long scenes from punk rock concerts, self-congratulatory voiceovers tell us we’re witnessing the birth of a resistance movement, and not just the mosh pits we thrashed in 15 years ago.

Fuller was just 21 when he started filming, and although his obliqueness often gets the better of him, sometimes it works just right. One image of Nicole’s and Cale’s feet nudging close together under a table in a diner says more about their loneliness and needs than a whole scene could. With such potential, it’s all the more troubling that the film’s most startling moment is one that signals complete creative exhaustion—the randomly inserted clip from Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer’s 1987 press conference, where he shot himself in the head on camera. I can think of no reason why this is included other than its notoriety in punk circles (it inspired Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot”), and to create a mood of hopeless, suicidal pessimism on the cheap. Mission accomplished. Brendon Nafziger
July 24, 2009