previously published on Cineuropa
It is difficult to try
and define Gutterbee, the second feature directed by Danish
actor-turned-filmmaker Urlich Thomsen. The film is a
satire, a broad comedy and a drama about racism and sausages and
which, set in a decaying American small town, also flirts with the
neo-western. Gutterbee is having its European premiere in
the Official Competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, a
month after its world premiere at the Sao Paulo International Film
Festival.
Sheriff Brown (Chance
Kelly) assumes the role of the on-screen narrator and takes
us through the events that unfolded in the titular small town of the
American Southwest. It all began when the local racist bully, Jimmy
Jerry Lee Jones Jr (played by W Earl Brown), who
fancies himself the town's boss, ran out of enemies to harass and
turned his attention to calm German sausage maker and scholar Edward
Hofler (Scottish actor Ewan Bremner), a man
determined to open a sausage restaurant called Gourmet House of
Refuge in a defunct chapel he bought in town. Jimmy hates everything
foreign, including foreign people and foreign food. He actually uses
Donald Trump’s slogan America First as a greeting and blindly
trusts his rooster's paranormal skills in sensing the foreigner in
town. Nobody actually likes Jimmy and nobody cares for his
world-view, but no one dares stand up to him, knowing that he is
supported by the town's greedy evangelical priest (Clark
Middleton). That is, until Edward refuses to abandon his
projects and leave. Besides the sheriff, who remains more or less
passive, the film also shares with the the point of view of another
character, Mike (Antony Starr), a hustler and
Jimmy's former henchman who became Edward's new business partner
after returning from prison, and who tries to be a mediator before
the confrontation turns nasty. And after a few incidents, it sure
does…
The central problem with
Gutterbee is that writer-director Thomsen seems unsure about
what he is aiming for: a comedy ranging from laugh-out-loud to
gross-out to simply bizarre; a satire; an examination of a social
landscape of rural Americana; a drama about racism, a statement
against it or something completely different. The film is filled with
a gallery of characters each only defined by one or two quirks, and
the story occasionally drifts away in many subplots which tend to go
nowhere and only serve to pass the time or to score a laugh or two,
when the general plot of the film does not simply move back and forth
between one conflicted party and the other.
The cast, consisting of
mainly anglophone actors from the ranks of indie films and
television, has the difficult task of finding and maintaining the
right blend of weirdness and caricature that best suits their
characters. But the real issue is that everyone has to do so
individually and on there own, since there is no clear lead
character. As a former actor, Thomsen should be able to communicate
exactly what he wants from his cast, yet he does not seem to do that,
for whatever reason: could it be a lack of interest, a lack of
directorial skill or simply the absence of any basic idea for what to
do with all these characters.
On the other hand,
Gutterbee is not a hard watch. It is easy, breezy and,
ultimately, fun, with Edward’s lectures about history and about
various types of sausage types being the highlights of the film,
alongside with the way the film slams the evangelical right for their
greed or bigotry. It is also very nice to look at — thanks to
Anthony Dod Mantle's (Antichrist, 127
Hours) cinematography in vivid, summery colours — and to
listen to, with most of the songs on the soundtrack adding another
layer of humour to proceedings.
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