LAFF 2013: POLLYWOGS

Sarah (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Dylan (Karl Jacob) in Pollywogs.

Minne me

By Don Simpson

Recovering from yet another failed relationship, Dylan (co-director Karl Jacob) retreats back to his rural Minnesota hometown for a family reunion. In cinema and literature, an urban protagonist often returns to their rural hometown out of necessity, and they do so with apprehension and fear. These characters are stereotypical patronizing urban elitists, who are eventually forced to learn that the town they left behind is not all that bad. In the case of Pollywogs, however, Dylan has returned home to reboot his life, to get back on track again. While he may not be able to work in a lucrative career here, this quaint Minnesota lake community serves as a magical respite from his not-so-happy adult life.

Upon arrival, idyllic memories of Sarah — Dylan’s first love at age ten — rush straight to his head; then, as fate would have it, Sarah (Kate Lyn Sheil) appears at Dylan’s family reunion. They have not seen each other for 18 years, yet they both have held onto idealized fantasies about what it would be like to reunite. That is a heck of a lot of pressure for two single people who may or may not be wanting to fall back in love.

Dylan and Sarah form a cute foursome with Dylan’s cousin, Julie (Jennifer Prediger), and her husband, Bo (Larry Mitchell), which temporarily eases the romantic pressure. Luckily, they have plenty of booze and weed to calm their nerves and a sauna to steam things up. The drastic juxtaposition of sweating in the hot sauna and shivering in the frigid lake seems like a perfect metaphor for the fluctuating hot and cold feelings between Dylan and Sarah.

They are obviously confused and who can blame them? They were once so close, but that was so long ago. Dylan and Sarah barely know each other any more. Eighteen years have passed. Dylan is now a full-fledged New Yorker, while Sarah seems temporarily content with taking care of her ailing grandmother in Minnesota. As their pasts begin to inform their present, Dylan finds himself desperately pawing at Sarah because he is the type of person who anxiously jumps from one relationship to the next, but Sarah immediately regrets reciprocating his affections and begins to cower away. Having once been forced by her parents into living on a Branch Davidian commune in Colorado, Sarah is wary of doing anything that she does not want to do. David may be primed to jump off the (literal and figurative) cliff, but Sarah pauses and eventually chickens out.

Co-directors Jacob and T. Arthur Cottam approached this project with story points, then developed the characters and dialogue during a six month rehearsal process. The result is a foursome of fully realized characters whose actions are all backed up by motivations. That is not to say that the script is saturated with expository dialogue, because whenever characters are interrogated about their feelings or past, it is done so with the utmost level of naturalism.

The emotional honesty of Pollywogs is much too powerful for this story not to be rooted in some sense of reality. While we might not all have romantic crushes from age ten to fondly look back upon, most of us have some sort of idealized notion from our past that we would like to somehow reinstate into our present lives. The problem is that our ten-year-old selves are hopefully nothing like our fully-matured selves, so something that enraptured us back then will probably not have the same effect on us now. That is why the resolution of Pollywogs is so important. Jacob and Cottam could have very easily chosen to go with an overtly saccharine Hollywood ending, but they opt to conclude the film in a manner much more true to real life.

SF INDIEFEST 2013: THE INTERNATIONAL SIGN OF CHOKING

A scene from The International Sign of Choking.

The Other opportunities

 

By Don Simpson

 

While Josh (Zach Weintraub) has presumably traveled to Buenos Aires to shoot an undefined video project, he seems much more interested in tracking down a woman named Martina. From what we can piece together, Josh has been to Buenos Aires at least once before and Martina is a woman with whom he enjoyed a fling or a crush or something. Then again, the past does not matter nearly as much as the present, which is essentially a collection of Josh’s failed attempts at tracking down Martina.

 

Enter Anna (Sophia Takal), another United States citizen who is staying in the same boarding house as Josh. Anna is not nearly as fluent in Spanish as Josh, thus establishing him as her a de facto translator. They begin to hang out more and more, but then Josh gets weird and pushes Anna away. It is incredibly fascinating to observe Josh’s on-again-off-again feelings towards Anna and how his wishy-washy, nonchalant attitude and overall indifference visibly makes Anna frustrated and upset. And who could blame her? Josh seems to be purposefully torturing Anna (as a consequence of his inability to track down Martina?), using her to quench his loneliness with sex one minute and pushing her away the next.

 

As a film that is essentially about the disassociation and loneliness of traveling alone to a foreign country, Weintraub’s The International Sign for Choking shows the passing-like-ships-in-the-night relationships that seem to go hand-in-hand with solo international treks. Foreign travel is often romanticized as an opportunity to enjoy love without attachment, but what happens when one is prone to becoming attached? We have no idea what Josh and Martina’s relationship was like, or how long ago it occurred, but it is fairly likely that it was similar to his relationship with Anna. Maybe Josh did not realize he liked Martina until after he left Buenos Aires, and by then it was too late? In which case, will he feel the same way about Anna in a few months (or years)? Will Anna be yet another missed opportunity, another woman whom Josh let slip through his fingers?

 

Weintraub creates two protagonists who are not typical American tourists — the kind that locals probably disdain (Josh and Anna meet some of those very types of tourists one night in a bar); instead, Josh and Anna strive to immerse themselves in Argentine culture, closely observing Argentine habits and idiosyncrasies. So, on one level, Josh might be an ideal tourist but, as far as relationships go, his inability to establish lasting connections is far from idealized.