Dir. Goran Dukic, US, 2006, 88 mins
Cast: Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Shea Whigham, Tom Waits
Review by Carol Allen
The idea of a delightfully entertaining comedy about suicide sounds like the ultimate contradiction in terms but Croatian debut director Dukic has pulled it off in the this highly original, stylish and darkly funny movie.
To be fair, it’s not so much about suicide as suicide being the portal, which takes you into Dukic’s bizarre alternative universe, which is an afterlife for those who have killed themselves and is just like life in today’s America only about a hundred times worse. The dark tone of the film is set right at the beginning, when Zia (Fugit), is cleaning up his chaotic apartment to the sound of Waits singing that “now she is dead” before cutting his wrists, then spotting, as he lies dying on the now impeccably clean bathroom floor, that there’s a lump of dust in the corner that he’s missed. Zia then finds himself in a dreary, depressed and slightly skewed version of the world from which he was trying to escape. You still have to pay your way though, so Zia gets a job in a tacky bar and shares an apartment with an annoying Austrian flat mate, who moans that Zia’s eaten his cottage cheese. He also makes a friend, a mad Russian rock musician called Eugene (Whigham), living with his whole family, who have killed themselves en masse in a fit of typical Slavonic gloom. When Zia discovers that the love of his life Desiree (Leslie Bibb), who was the reason for his suicide, has also killed herself, he and Eugene set off on a trek in Eugene’s battered old car through this weird Never Never Land to find her. On the way they pick up Mikal (Sossamon), who claims she’s in this afterlife by mistake and is looking for whoever is in charge to get it rectified.
Fugit, who played the boy hero in Almost Famous, has grown up into a very engaging young actor. Sossaman is both heartbreakingly pretty and likeable, and Whigham a total eccentric delight. The story is very well imagined in its witty detail. There are no stars in the sky of this world and nobody is able to smile. The headlights on Eugene’s car cannot be made to work, so they can only drive during the day and there’s a black hole in the floor of the car, down which objects literally disappear forever. Waits’s gravelly musical contributions add to the darkly comic mood, as does his cameo role as the sort of Wizard of Oz proprietor of a bizarre holiday camp, where mini miracles happen and which the trio happen upon towards the end of their journey.
Dukic’s use of colour is also dramatically very effective. Washed-out near black and white for the afterlife, which gradually acquires a bit more colour as the journey progresses and the characters get more involved with each other, contrasted with the bright colours of life itself, of which we get brief glimpses. And despite being made in America with an American cast, it has a very quirky, East European feel and a kind of visual poetry, which is very pleasing.
