Frownland

At last year’s SXSW Film Festival, Ronald Bronstein’s remarkable debut feature Frownland shared the special jury prize with Ry Russo Young’s Orpha and has since acquired a small but fervent cult that is sure to grow. Homemade and as literal as its title, Frownland careens for 106 grueling minutes around a man in crisis, to put it mildly. Full of harsh cuts, minimal production values, garish lighting, explosively grainy images, dreamy music cues, and deliberate tonal abrasiveness, nothing in the film serves to directly please the viewer.

Reminiscent of maverick filmmakers as diverse as the Kuchar Brothers, Ken Jacobs, Fredrick Wiseman, Lars Von Trier, and, of course, John Cassavetes, Bronstein’s camera penetrates its subject with painful clarity and depth, gliding around the characters with an often uncomfortable intimacy. Something deeply troubling and difficult to pin down is taking place in these character's lives, and for 106 minutes Ronald Bronstein’s feature wallows with them in despair, grim humor, and brief glimpses of solace.

Frownland rests on the shoulders of Dore Mann, who delivers a brave, searing performance as an emotionally disabled, moderately working-class, outer-borough stiff. Selling coupons door to door to scrape by, Keith Sontag (Mann) quarrels about bills with his unemployed musician roommate (Paul Grimstad, who contributed the haunting music) and desperately tries to console an hysterical female friend named Laura (Mary Bronstein, who married the director), a young woman whose moods seem to oscillate between catatonia and the brink of suicide. Over the course of a week or so, we witness Keith’s slow descent into mania, as he attempts and fails again and again to connect on the most basic levels with other human beings in the purgatory that is his Queens.

Mann is deeply unskilled, nervous, grating, and all too self-conscious, with oily skin and receding black hair, seemingly without prospects or hopes for the future. The equally miserable milieu he inhabits continully heaps indignity, self-loathing, and emotional solitude upon him. At one point, while trying to engage his employer in a conversation, Keith describes himself as a “troll from under the bridge." In one shockingly hilarious moment near the opening, he tries to console the distraught Laura, who ignores him and walks into a gas station food mart. While she’s gone, he pries his eyes open as wide as he can, until he begins crying, only to hold them longer, until she returns. Should we find pathos in this man’s plight, empathy for his sorrows? I don’t think the film is so sure, and that is what becomes so completely unsettling as he stumbles toward doom.

An ultra low-fi, old-school American indie, shot over the course of three years in rough-hewn, academy ratio 16mm by Sean Williams and edited by the director, Frownland has a primal immediacy unlike anything you’ll see on American screens this year. This is perhaps the most wrenching portrait of desperation I’ve ever seen, the type of film that gives credibility to the term “independent” in an increasingly Darwinian marketplace. It is the story of a completely unappealing man told without compromise. See for yourself. You might regret it, but you won’t forget it.

                                                              Brandon Harris