Primer
In all probability, I am the only person who didn't know about Primer until yesterday. (Thank you, Jason Kottke.) I don't as a rule write about films that I've only seen a few times and only very recently, but there is so much here to come back to that I want to catch the nimbus of awe that surrounds the experience right now. I watched the film twice yesterday afternoon, the second time listening to the commentary of Shane Carruth, the writer, director, and star, a man whose first film this is. (He edited it, too.) Make that a man with no filmmaking experience of any kind prior to working on this project. It's as though Hitchcock, not Athena, had sprung fully grown from the head of Zeus. Every scene was story-boarded, so that Primer was virtually pre-edited. The almost indigestible aspect of the film is it's cost: $7000. And I do mean film. It was shot in Super16; when it was chosen to show at Sundance, an investor chipped in $25,000 to have it blown up onto thirty-five millimeter film.
Mr Carruth performs all of his jobs capably, sometimes with real inspiration, but as a star he's a star. His face is remarkably interesting: sometimes handsome (once in a while quite handsome), sometimes ordinary, and sometimes a little odd. Its expressions can be heavy and even a little thuggish, or extremely delicate. Mr Carruth is very good at dawning recognition. And he has turned five-o'clock shadow from the look of macho allure so popular lately into a sad intimation of mortality. His co-star, David Sullivan, is a professional actor, and he can do great-actory things; he completely realizes his character's leaden recognition that he has been outfoxed. But Mr Carruth seems lighted from within, not just intellectually, as, say, Jude Law and Ewan McGregor so often do, but anatomically as well.
Primer is "about" time travel, in the way that North By Northwest is about stolen government secrets. It's really about trust, risk, and the pursuit of glory. It is about grown-up kids with no real sense of moral consequences who are bored with their day jobs and itching to make huge fortunes. Of four original partners, two pull apart to develop a smaller, less expensive version of a device that, according to Mr Carruth, actually exists. Don't ask me. Along the way, they discover that their invention has interesting side effects. Great pains are taken to simulate the atmosphere of genuine discovery - the tedium that's occasionally cut by extraordinary elation.
The film needs to be seen twice, partly because it is so complex - trying to find out what the characters are up to distracts somewhat from their project's meaning - and partly because the area of filmmaking for which Mr Carruth was least prepared (by his own admission) was sound. A good deal of the dialogue is looped, and in the interest of verisimilitude the characters often speak over one another. The scientific arcana is not a nuisance, but it's easier to watch the film when you know how relatively unimportant it is. Primer goes right to the brink of mystification, but it doesn't fall in. (Although the details of time-travel are kinky, they're not pressingly important. But there has evidently been a great deal of industrious obsessing about the story "timelines." (I've found one rather elegant-looking solution.)
This has to be the most astonishing debut in the history of cinema. That's what staggers me now. I think that it's a remarkable movie by any standards. We'll see if that impression lasts.
