Radiance Films: Palindromes (2004) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Radiance Films

American provocateur filmmaker Todd Solondz whose last film was the 2016 episodic vignettes ensemble Wiener-Dog is enjoying something of a career renaissance on home video lately.  While busily teaching as a professor at New York University, Solondz’s work characterized as a candy-colored sardonic look at the darkly comic and often disturbing way of North American suburban life has been receiving digitally remastered 2K and 4K special editions supervised and approved by the director.  

Recently The Criterion Collection unveiled the long-awaited anamorphic widescreen release of his 1998 jet black comedy masterpiece Happiness on 4K UHD while Shout Factory released a 2K restoration of the unrated cut of Storytelling.  UK based boutique label Radiance Films who have also begun releasing films in the US put out a Region B locked director-approved special edition of his first major film Welcome to the Dollhouse (reviewed here by Michelle Kisner) and today they’ve unveiled their very first 4K UHD disc release of perhaps the filmmaker’s most provocative and arguably last great film with his 2004 multifaceted shocker Palindromes.
 
Ever since she was a little girl for whatever reason, Aviva has wanted to have lots of babies.  As a preteen, against her parents’ (played brilliantly by Ellen Barkin and Richard Masur) wishes and with an apparent lack of good judgment, Aviva proceeds by any means to impregnate herself whether it means getting raped by her cousin or allowing herself to be kidnapped and abused by a pedophile in the film’s most plainly transgressive scene.  

As her episodic sojourn unfolds in the director’s time-honored candy colored twee aesthete and deliberate break with realism, much like Happiness it becomes a sardonic peeling away of the layers of suburbia and particularly the post-9/11 national character.  Touching on statutory rape, sodomy, abortion and Christian fundamentalism, Aviva eventually finds herself on the spooky grounds of a foster home spearheaded by Mama Sunshine (Debra Monk) and Dr. Dan (Richard Riehle) who themselves harbor a dark secret with respect to abortion clinics.  

 
While all of this is going on, throughout the film the titular Aviva whose name and character herself is a palindrome remaining unchanged in personality is played by seven different actresses of different ages and ethnicities and one male actor.  Jumping between disparate chapters with the Hallmark Card borders and font with imprints of baby feet on the screen as composer Nathan Larson’s score veers towards sitcom twee with a vocal undertone of Rosemary’s Baby, the characters in the world of Palindromes don’t notice the casting changes but we are consciously aware of them.  

Utilizing a number of child non-actors including Emani Sledge, Valerie Shusterov, Hannah Freiman and Rachel Corr, the film eventually starts interspersing more recognizable character actors including then-obese black actress Sharon Wilkins whose figure adorns the poster illustration and debatably the most striking actress in the saga.  At one point Jennifer Jason Leigh shows up opposite late Welcome to the Dollhouse actor Matthew Faber reprising his role of Mark Wiener the brother of that film’s beleaguered protagonist in the film’s most telling sequence with Faber arguably functioning as a stand-in for Solondz himself.

 
A thoroughly misanthropic, provocative, transgressive meditation on motherhood in a broken, deeply damaged world rife with perverse twisted vices lurking underneath a façade of happy-go-lucky cheerfulness, Palindromes like most of Solondz’s work post-Welcome to the Dollhouse is darkly humorous and uncompromisingly discomforting.  Touching on a number of existential themes regarding maternalism in America as well as furiously blasting away at carefully hidden cultural taboos, it takes place as a sort of sequel film to Welcome to the Dollhouse for coexisting within the same universe while also being further removed from that film’s sense of coming-of-age hopeless optimism.  If things seemed uncertain for whatever the future held for Dollhouse’s Dawn Wiener, they’ve gotten considerably worse since then. 
 
Given a saturated candy-colored aesthete by House of 1,000 Corpses cinematographer Tom Richmond rendered with heavy grain levels by a restored 4K scan from the Museum of Modern Art, one of the virtues of a Todd Solondz film is that his worlds feel threatening and acerbic but they look like a nightly family sitcom.  This has always been an intentional conundrum and dichotomy within Solondz’s work, pairing the cheerful comic artifice with unadorned nastiness.  

Think of it as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie if it were directed by Lars Von Trier who like Solondz also bears a propensity for savage artistic cruelties.  With Happiness, Storytelling and finally Palindromes pushing deep into NC-17 terrain (perhaps the last time Solondz would do so), the director arguably peaked with his brand of transgressive smart-nosed scathing satire with this film and for some reason his edge softened with his next few pictures before petering out entirely.
 
Despite the director going on the record as hating the process and ordeal of filmmaking itself, Todd Solondz’s oeuvre is enjoying a renewed interest in cinephile circles with the ongoing restoration and reissuing of his filmography in crisp new digital restorations.  Radiance Films have made a bold choice in making Palindromes their first foray into the medium, challenging the devoted Radiance collectors while also signaling what seems like a rallying call to arms of defiance by pushing boldly difficult and often discomforting art into the mainstream discourse.  

Moreover, Solondz’s films operating on the fringes of the independent film circuit are now being canonized and reappraised for the underappreciated masterworks of daringly provocative cinema that they are.  It is unlikely that we’ll ever see a film this sharp edged from Solondz ever again but with Radiance Film’s deluxe two-disc Blu-Ray/4K UHD special edition we’re likely to go down this dark and jagged yellow brick road a few more times down the line.

--Andrew Kotwicki