Fredianelli's character type as distorted mirror of self
With the mash-up of a large cast and a lot of interaction shooting sequences, the film would seem to suffer from Bird's increasing loss of focus upon its central characters. Luckily, this film centers itself around character much more so than action sequences or even its cute colored objects within a black and white framework motif. Fredianelli himself has stated some dissatisfaction about his character: "I'm just going through the motions (and not very well at that) on the type of character I've done to death and sick of doing," but I think that detachment, that sense of the same-old same-old works much to the director's favor in this piece. Reminiscent of Alain Delon's bored performance in Un Flic, the frustration and laconic performance gives ways at times to staggering emotiveness, both in Fredianelli's writing and his willingness to abandon the familiar modes that he's already perfected.
Around the halfway point of the film, the crimer plot has unravelled for the most part, and the finish seems like it shouldn't be terribly far off. When he cuts to a still of a studious-looking man with a Briar in his mouth and the voiceover starts dictating on about a mission to assassinate the creator of the Xenobites, it seems as though Fredianelli's thus far razor sharp narrative, floundering for something to push it into feature-length time, has fallen into episodic storytelling. Although the transition does chop itself into the narrative, the story line that it develops between Van Calder and the creator's daughter turns the film from an entertaining crimer into a devastatingly personal statement about destructiveness in the face of human apathy.
Burnt cash, burnt body: destructiveness as character trait
To say that Fredianelli's general subtextual feature is nihilism seems like an understatement, but the work he's done films as disparate as The Mark, Violent by Nature, and the last five minutes of A Bird in the Bush all finally comes together as a cohesive statement in this film. Although I do think the film is misogynistic in all its excessive violence and emotional battering done to its female characters, it's clear in this picture that Fredianelli is not only aware of this tendency in the film but also manages to work on it, not to excuse it by any means but to shed some light on it.
After all the abuse, business-related and otherwise, and a nihilistic placement of his position in the world summed up by Shai Wilson's character: "You're a piece of shit [. . .] Like your
pathetic life means something? It doesn't [. . .] anyone who has a chance is going to use you. Cause that's all you are, a tool for better people. Nobody's ever given a shit about you, and no one ever will," the light romantic possibilities with the target's daughter seems like an oasis. Fredianelli borrows Chaplin's dinner roll dream from The Gold Rush with a heartbreaking dream sequence that, natural as it could be, seems like it was lifted from another film in the context of the piece as a whole.
Plausible connection? Fredianelli and Jana Ireton
This turn seems to divert the crimer plot in the same way the romantic comedy moments did in Bird, but the turn here sheds more light on the central character than any facade of romance could. Do these things excuse such brutality? Of course not, but I think it's safe to say that Fredianelli's aware of this too in such scenes as the brutal dispatching of Cassidy via plastic bag. The explication of these aspects, figured into the two women characters, serves to highlight the overall destructive nature of Van Calder, something that seems like it could be changed if it weren't for the caprices of oblivious parties and the folly of fate.
The fatal brush-off
This notion comes most sharply into focus when Van Calder accompanies the daughter to meet up with the father. Van Calder's earlier voiceover states that all he lives for after the unraveling of the crimer narrative is to take down as much of the operation as he can manage. In one simple gesture, any attempted belief in humanity becomes moot, and Van Calder can move on to the subsequent massacres that close the film.
The technical ecstasy that Fredianelli weaves here more often than not tends to serve the personal statement. With this film, he's again raised the bar for no budget filmmaking. The crisp black and white images with pitch-perfect editing only come down when inexplicable Sin City style color coating comes into play. That the flashbacks are in color is no matter because they perhaps reflect a time when possibilities seemed more abundant. However, the coloring of certain objects, while a nice technical feet, feels like a shallow, arbitrary stylistic trait. Other hiccups, like the aforementioned jump into the romance narrative or the deliberately vague treatment of the Xenobite characters, don't distract as much as the incessant voiceover, which, while expressing some measure of insight, tends to over explain. The film simply does not need moral guiding into the Xenobite project. One wishes Fredianelli would respect his audiences' attention a bit more with the device.
All in all though, even these problems get pushed aside by Fredianelli's emotional honesty, the drive of the narrative, the action scenes, and some fantastic acting by Fredianelli, Kevin Giffin, newcomer Henry Lee, and surprisingly good work from Jana Ireton. Here's to hoping that Fredianelli can manage to ignore the daft reviews that I've seen for the work so far. It might be his best film yet.
