Pop quiz: your boss (at right) at work is a big man. He starts telling you a story in a private back room after he’s showed off a big pistol. You’ve been having trouble getting laid, and his story of going to solicit a prostitute sounds like a sympathetic entrée. Then: “This girl was a man. I mean hairy balls and everything.” What do you do now? Silence, right? But your boss goes on, “No-one was around, so I said, ‘Fuck it.’ I fucked that shit like I was Jesus. And that shit felt goooood.” Pull back, the gun is under your chin. Yes, you agree to it being a secret, just between you and him. What you probably wouldn’t do is try to replicate this adventure.
This marks a turning point in The Sentimental Engine Slayer, and a welcome one. After wallowing in oblique narration and odd shot durations, the image-threads, colours, and icky, charged looks form a broken machine of the fantastic. This (kinda) makes it okay for the way the digital image doesn't always resolve itself, casting black lines that resurface the image.
The editing proceeds like the songs of The Mars Volta: crazy fast, uncertainty and risk coming from not knowing what is going on and long takes, where the danger comes from not finishing in time, from the variations and open-endedness. The band’s music, at its best, draws on rhythmic complexity. These may be frenetic, determining the lyric and melody, or they may develop from the searching spaces created by Omar Rodríguez-López, the band’s guitarist and chief songwriter, and, as credited at the start of The Sentimental Engine Slayer, writer, producer, and director of the film. He also plays the lead the character. He scores the film, naturlich.
Saturated in Mexican Technicolor Catholicism and a baking El Paso, one of the most visually interesting films in the Festival is surprisingly underwhelming for its sound. There are some fantastic passages of white noise, but volume is the main aural dynamic—the different channels are not employed.
But this does change after the introduction of the trans. Reality and fantasy become one – the psychiatrist is papa, sister is in your bed, man is a hot, available woman, you slay with impunity, your model car becomes the real deal.
López is all confidence and control on stage; here, despite being over 30, he manages to convincingly portray a geeky teenager (which I suppose is what he still is, producing album after album and involved in tons of musical projects). What works against him is his eyes: squinty and sunken, you probably see them for 15 seconds across the course of the film. This does not make for an engaging central character, which, while not fatal, makes it difficult to watch an already discordant film that is nonetheless relying on the urge to resolve narrative puzzles.
Screen memories: opiate skin poppers; bloody bathroom; the glance before shutting a door; Barlam’s arbitrary choking attacks
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