(Canada, 83 min.)
Dir. Kathryn Palmateer, Shawn Whitney; Writ. Shawn Whitney
Starring: Manuel Rodriguez-Saenz, Clinton Lee Pontes, Freya
Ravensbergen
Clones overrun the multiplex these days. Twilights, Hunger Gameses, new RoboCops,
and inbred Marvel movies fill the screens with cinematic carbon copies. Every
other movie seems like the one that came before it. Fortunately, though, A Brand New You might legitimately have
claim to being the first and only microbudget cloning comedy that Canadian has
ever produced. This lo-fi film is fun, creative, and refreshingly original.
Attempting a cloning experiment with one’s roommates doesn’t
seem like a smart idea, especially when one has moved in as recently as
Santiago has (and tried to commit suicide in the interim). Santiago makes his
plot über dodgy, though, by enlisting his other roommate, Murray (Clinton Lee
Pontes), to play the role of mad scientist. Murray, a slob who spends the day
walking around the house in little more than a bathrobe of body hair, just
happens to be a disgraced biologist with a mix of Stephen Hawking smarts and
Dr. Nick sketchiness. Pontes is lots of fun as the madcap Murray while Rodriguez-Saenz
and Ravensbergen have strong chemistry to sell the messy awkwardness of the
roommates’ relationship.
A Brand New You also
has a healthy heart, as it gives Rodriguez-Saenz a fine emotional arc on which to
take Santiago throughout the experiment. Santiago, for example, carries his
iPad around the house to memorialize his dead wife. He mopes about watching
videos of Viviana (played in the movies within the movie by Dadal Badr) that he
took during their marriage so that he’d have something to remember her by in
case the worst happened. The worst did happen, so Santiago fills Viviana’s
absence with strange clips of her lying in bed while looking into the lens or uncomfortably
giving one side of a conversation while Santiago asks questions from the other
side of the viewfinder. Viviana protests throughout these videos and makes
clear that she’d much rather spend her marriage with her husband than spend it
playing his movie muse. The awkwardness of Viviana’s videos, however, motivates
Santiago to learn from the past with his cloning experiment: rather than try to
recapture something for later pleasure, he learns simply to appreciate what he
has in the present. This lesson fuels Santiago’s push-and-pull relationship
with Laura and it teaches him that a fresh start is a better future.
This low budget cloning experiment feels unconsciously meta.
Without the means to build a state of the art lab, Santiago and Murray equip
the cloning workshop “Breaking Bad” style and scrounge up their tools with
five-finger discounts and thrifty good fortune. As the members of the boarding
house accumulate equipment for their science project on E-Bay and both harvest
and fertilize ovaries in their own kitchen, the quirky antics of A Brand New You make DIY philosophy much
of the film’s charm.
Palmateer and Whitney, much like Santiago and Murray, get
creative with the tools at their disposal to devise this cloning comedy. The
husband-and-wife directing team transforms the intimate space of small-scale
comedy into something fresh and new with this cloning caper. Don’t go into A Brand New You expecting newfangled
doo-dads and visual gimmicks, for the elements of science fiction exist purely
in the amusing dialogue and in the situational humour, which give A Brand New You a fresh generic
hybridity and let it stand out amidst other minimalist indie fare. The wacky
antics of the trio of amateur scientists are fun, sometimes uproariously so,
and it complements the strange and unusual character of the film’s sci-fi
premise.
Rating: ★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
A Brand New You has its world premiere at Worldfest Houston on
Sunday, April 6 at 7:00 pm.
