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| Images courtesy of EDGLRD |
Harmony Korine has had many creative career phases as an
original audiovisual artist who initially broke into film via Larry Clark’s Kids
which he wrote the screenplay for when he was only 19 before moving onto
mounting his own theatrical features.
His early phase beginning with Gummo and julien donkey-boy
which was the first American film to be branded with the Dogme 95 moniker
started by Danish filmmakers Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier. Soon he jumped from gritty and grimy yet kaleidoscopic
and fleeting to a more polished style with Mister Lonely before
violently hitting the reverse button with his VHS tape shot and edited Trash
Humpers, for some the director’s artistic peak and others his nadir. Then came Spring Breakers and The Beach
Bum which saw a new Floridian phase that was more inviting and visually
arresting than anything he had done before up to that time. For me personally this was Korine at his very
best.
And now following those two, he has gone for a Trash Humpers
vibe with a little bit of Spring Breakers sprinkled in with his new AI
infused and infrared multicolored freakouts AGGRO DR1FT and now on his edglrd.com
website as well as Amazon Prime and Apple TV the new HFR (high-frame-rate)
videogame-as-movie film Baby Invasion.
For all intents and purposes, Korine is working as he always has: a
Dadaist ruminating on the nebulous aimlessness of criminality who doesn’t scorn
his difficult subjects so much as he buddies up to them. Whether it involves the Spring Breakers turned
crime spree quartet of young girls or the hazy meanderings of the titular The
Beach Bum, Korine is something of a master of the uneducated lost wanderer
foraging through life however bizarre or uncanny the circumstances may be. Still, even Korine die-hards might have a
little trouble with his latest venture which is being offered in two cuts: pure
or impure or in other words with or without voiceover narration.
The plot, if there is one in this experimental thriller
venture, seems to involve a first-person shooter game by a team of videogame
developers being “interviewed” before the film begins. The game dubbed Baby Invasion consists
of a team of mercenaries donning AI generated baby faces who spend their past
time invading the mansions and lush properties of wealthy and powerful people,
often murdering everyone in the process.
The trouble is the game itself seems to have leaked out into the dark
web and soon gamers livestreaming it are unable to tell if what’s happening
within the game is pure fantasy or if the Baby Invasion antics are
spilling over into real life, whatever plane of reality this film’s HFR AI entombed
world seems to pulsate in. Though the
film has a scant few cast members in it, simply designated by color, the star
of this show is Harmony Korine’s Dadaist sensibility compounded with Burial’s
commissioned score droning on like an endless nightclub act.
Picking up right where AGGRO DR1FT left off, replete
with a brief foray into infrared photography, tons of AI alterations and those same
exact devil horns characters adorned in his last feature, Baby Invasion
for many will either be a tedious exercise in digital Dada Art or it will be an
even further blurring of the lines dividing cinema from video gaming. A work of ‘post cinema’ where the footage was
shot and then poured over with digital effects work in 4K resolution with high
frame rate camera movement by Joao Rosa, the intent of the film kind of reminds
of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble which sought to simultaneously introduce
theatrical and video-on-demand home viewing, a practice that has since become
the norm. While the film is available on
Apple TV and Amazon Prime, Korine’s hope and intent seems to be that people
Airplay this from their cellular phones to their smart TV, a technique that
still has some bugs and kinks to be worked out of it but nevertheless is a new
wave of the future.
An unfettered and often deliberately indigestible chunk of pure
cinema that feels somewhere between Miami, Florida and the Grand Theft Auto games
which AGGRO DR1FT also strongly went for with Harmony Korine’s trademark
elliptical Terrence Malick inspired editing and disembodied voiceover, Baby
Invasion which played at the Venice Film Festival before premiering on the
director’s EDGLRD website is a tough one even for die hard fans. With the same intentional inanities as Trash
Humpers with some claustrophobic forays into digitally rendered Hell and
the sense that you’re watching someone’s downloaded video on a computer
desktop, Baby Invasion out of the gate is not going to be for most
people, no. It is intentionally
meandering, occasionally brutally violent and more than a little
exasperating. But if you surrender
yourself to its waking digital nightmarish vibes it will absolutely take you on
an audiovisual journey. While I can’t
say this is my favorite phase of Korine’s ever evolving filmography, it is
nevertheless wholly original and unique whether it works or not.
--Andrew Kotwicki
