With “Spring Breakers” and “Pain & Gain” (which opens today), it’s the year of amateur-criminals-in-Florida movies, and a third film in the batch, also opening today (at the Cinema Village and on national video-on-demand), is the best of them: Amy Seimetz’s “Sun Don’t Shine.” I saw it nearly a year ago, at the Maryland Film Festival and again, last fall, at the La Di Da Festival at 92Y Tribeca. (My capsule review is in the magazine this week.) It’s an instant classic of lovers on the run; though made for a low budget, it’s got performances and ideas to rival those in movies at any scale. Seimetz starts the movie at a furious pitch and in medias res, with its two young protagonists, Crystal (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Leo (Kentucker Audley) in the midst of a knock-down muddy brawl that for all of its brutality exudes a wayward and desperate tenderness that is the movie’s emotional core.
There’s a body in the trunk of the car; it’s that of Crystal’s husband, and Leo is driving to Tampa, where he knows someone—an ex-lover, a woman of a certain age—who he thinks will be able to help. Along the way, every turn conjures paranoia, from the friendly stranger who wants to lend a hand when their car stalls and the police cars with sirens blaring on the highway to the phone call that Crystal places at a roadside convenience store. Leo and Crystal share love and distrust, cozy dreams and blank horizons, and the sweatily oppressive glare of the Sunshine State steams up swampy menace, sticky lust, torpid thinking, and feral solitude. Seimetz’s direction, with its efficient, light-scarred impressionism and its use of isolated voices and hypnotic visions, unleashes furious power from her lead actors. Audley conveys a brutish love through violence in repose; Leo is the reluctant criminal, able to prove devotion by his mere implication in the plot—every word and gesture comes out like a blow meant as a caress. Sheil lends Crystal a damaged terror, a shredded and stifled fear that simmers in spasmodic jitters and bursts out in primordial shrieks of long-repressed rage. Their energy comes from deep within, their gestures and inflections are as surprising as they are sharply, painfully expressive. It’s a straightforward story, each moment of which Seimetz sees (and hears) as amazingly complex conflicts. Imagine that each of her logically conceived, clearly composed images were shot through with vectors ranging far and deep and wildly askew into the Florida landscape and through her characters’ very souls.
Terence Nance’s wondrously inventive first feature, “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” also opens today (at Cinema Village and Film Society of Lincoln Center). It, too, is a story of romantic frenzy, but of an entirely different sort. (My capsule review is in this week’s issue, too.) Its director is also its protagonist, a young man who worries that he is oversimplifying the beauty of the woman he loves—and who makes an amazingly and delightfully complex film to say so. It’s an intricate collection of frames within frames, a takeoff from Nance’s 2006 short film, “How Would You Feel?,” in which he poses his romantic frustrations in his pursuit of the woman as a problem to which he has no answer other than to pose the very question in a kaleidoscopic range of registers—confessional history, animation, archival footage, interviews, self-documentation on the film festival circuit, and even fragments of a film by his beloved, Namik Minter, as she attempts to respond to his depiction of her. As Nance poses his questions in an ever more sincerely self-questioning, self-revealing, self-doubting mode, he gains in inner and outer experience. His frenetic performance in the name of love, a feature-length troubadour poem meant to win a woman’s heart, becomes the very sediment of wisdom.
A word on words: Nance’s profuse, lyrical, comical, mercurially apostrophizing voice-over, in its archly ironic gravity, reminds me of Ernest Hemingway’s complaint about Herman Melville’s loftily rhetorical diction (I posted here a couple of years ago on the subject). I disagree with Hemingway; I think that rhetoric is itself potentially a matter of great moral import, and Nance’s splendidly literary voice-over is a terrific example. Why couch strong emotions in verbiage that veers from orotund to skittering? Maybe for the same reason that plums go into pudding: to cook them, to soften them, to sweeten them, to avoid the raw and the acidulous. Nance is, in effect, cooking his emotions, trying to extract finer feelings and more nuanced, more complex, more enduring sensations without denaturing them. His giddily intricate aesthetic—verbal as well as visual and formal—is no mere adornment; it’s integral to his romantic pilgrimage.
