Impolex @ The Boston Underground Film Festival

[Dave Monroe]

MARCH 26 » 5:45p
MARCH 31 » 5:30p

NEW ENGLAND PREMIERE with ALEX ROSS PERRY

2009, USA, 75 min.
Director/Screenwriter: Alex Ross Perry (in attendance)
Cast: Riley O’Brien, Kate Lyn Sheil, Eugene Mirman, Ben Shapiro, Bruno
Meyrick Jones

View the Trailer

Tyrone S., a U.S. army solider, wanders through an unidentified
wilderness searching for missing rockets. Recurring characters
(figments of his imagination? figures from his past?) show up
o ffering advice and making small talk. An old lover reminds Tyrone of
their life back home and what he’s left behind.

A little context goes a long way toward understanding Alex Ross
Perry’s enigmatic Impolex. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow, the film tells the story, albeit obliquely, of Operation
Paperclip, an actual World War II mission to locate undetonated German
V2 rockets in the forests of Europe.

But to say it’s just about that is too reductive. It’s about a lot of
other things too: our connections to objects and to principles and to
people, and how tenuous our grip on reality can be. And it manages to
be about all these things without much ever happening. The plot of
Impolex can only be discerned dimly, as if through a dream-like fog.

I realize saying a film is virtually plotless won’t sound like a
ringing endorsement to a lot of folks, but I can’t stress enough that
Impolex is an extremely compelling and rewarding experience if you
give yourself over to the film’s hallucinatory rhythms and deliberate
pacing.

Riley O’Brien delivers an somnambulistic performance as Tyrone. While
he’s admittedly an aquired taste, it’s easy to see why Perry wrote the
part for his unique charms. Kate Lyn Sheil deserves a special mention
too. Toward the end of the film, she delivers a stunning nine-minute
monologue in a single unbroken close-up. She has a penetratingly
honest screen presence and it is a joy to watch her perform.

In the vein of classic midnight movies like David Lynch’s Eraserhead,
Impolex is a puzzling and darkly humorous tone poem that worms its way
into your brain and will stick with you long after you leave the
theatre.

http://bostonunderground.org/schedule/impolex/