(Canada, 90 min.)
Written and directed by Mark Penney
Starring:
Shaun Benson, Elaine Gagnon
Digital is a war that film seems to be losing. It’s not
necessarily a question of Quentin Tarantino versus Mike Leigh in which one
great filmmaker fights to preserve the warmth and texture of 70mm film stock while
the other auteur simply accepts and
embraces the latest change in the industry. It’s also not a question of digital
democracy, since the economy of digital cinema means that there are more voices
that ever in the film scene. That’s never a bad thing when the lesser cost of
shooting and distributing on digital means that films like I Put a Hit on You, The Animal Project, Cinemanovels, and
other microbudget CanCon find life for innovative filmmakers to introduce less
conventional works of art to fans seeking alternative to the mainstream. There’s
more valuable work than ever before thanks to digital cinema; however, as with
anything else in consumer culture like social media or fast food, one needs to
filter out the noise a bit more actively to find the good stuff.
One such DIY digital affair in the pile to push aside is the microbudget Montreal-set pic The Beautiful Risk. The film shows an admirable stretch of ambitions, but it’s also a great example for how a filmmaker might best put a modest chunk of change towards his or her next project instead of making a movie for a couple hundred bucks in the interim. There’s great work by indie mavericks out there, and the artistic and technical shortcomings of The Beautiful Risk are proof by comparison.
The film aspires to a Bret Easton Ellis-like trashiness as
fledgling artist William Murphy (Shaun Benson) gets over his divorce by relocating
from New York to Montreal and indulging in booze, drugs, sex, and strippers to escape/fuel
his depression. None of it really works as a post-empire-like commentary that
finds beauty in the residual trash of another tier of culture—it’s not, say, The Canyons—as William’s tailspin is
more akin to licking a splash of Pabst Blue Ribbon off the barroom floor than
it is a stroke of poetry. Even when he stumbles upon a Montreal waif named Paulette
(Elaine Gagnon), the film struggles to fuse its hybrid inclination for both
trash and poetry. As Paulette sets William free by offering him her body and inviting
him to do all sorts of Fifty Shades of
Grey inspired kink, The Beautiful
Risk leaves the audience with a pair of dead, wilted roses. It sounds
harsh, true, but an underground vibe and a little spanking don’t inherently
produce a work of art when they come together.
The Beautiful Risk
mostly struggles because it gives little reason to care about William as he
falls in the gutter. Some flashbacks to a hooker with a tramp stamp in a motel
room and a few intercuts to a random couch tease memories of his divorce, but
nothing ever redeems William from his escalating unlikability. Some intercuts
to nature and shots of a dilapidated farm also appear during William’s trysts
with Paulette, and while they’re unintentionally hilarious pastoral images,
they don’t have an effective associative connection to either lover.
Benson and Gagnon also struggle to give much life to their
thinly sketched characters and the technical limitations of The Beautiful Risk don’t help, either.
Much of the dialogue is simply inaudible, for the film sounds as if it used a
Smartphone app to loop the dialogue in places in which the rough location sound
struggles to emerge through the scratchy patchwork of the audio. Penny,
however, has a promising eye for location shooting (he also serves as DP) and he
uses downtown Montreal and the snowy Canadian winter quite effectively. The
gaudy lighting of the strip club William visits is equally striking and this
setting could be one of the few instances in which the DIY exploration of
despair and the underworld works, if only it weren’t overwhelmed by the flat
ambient noises of the club’s seedy beat and the otherwise bland cinematography
that characterizes much of the film. Even strip clubs, it seems, can be boring.
The Beautiful Risk
shows that DIY films have an edginess that one rarely sees even in films lying
outside of the mainstream, but the beauty lies in the innovation with which one
harnesses the limits of independent filmmaking to its advantage. Take a risk on
something else.
Rating: ★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Beautiful Risk is now available on Vimeo, Google Play, and
Amazon Prime.
