Writer-director Cam Archer's new film Shit Year is the kind of thing that makes me nervous. My entire formal education in film was aimed toward training me to make films like this (no, I haven't fallen off the wagon or anything, the only word for this type of work is “film”): non-linear impressionistic black-and-white aggressively non-commercial and frequently intentionally irritating “films.” The thing about this kind of work is that, when done right, it's exhilarating and opens the viewer's mind to the possibilities of the medium and all that cool shit, but when done badly nothing in the fucking universe sucks as fucking much as a “film” made by a talentless dipshit. I mean it's torture. Note, earlier in my adjectival barrage about the art film that informed my early college years, the word “pretentious” was not included. That's because the good shit in art cinema isn't pretending to be awesome, it just is. The bad stuff is the reason the word “pretentious” is such a slur. Shit that sucks pretending to be something amazing, where if you “don't get it” (read: ooh and ahh insufficiently or fail to hail the filmmaker as the next Stan Brakhage/Bruce Conner/Maya Deren) you get called a philistine retard incapable of getting anything deeper than Big Momma's House, well, I haven't any use for that. And because of the enormous divide between good and bad at play here, I get extremely apprehensive about going to see avant-garde/experimental/art cinema, and thus don't see as much of it as I arguably should.
With that in mind, the fact that Shit Year took me back to my sophomore year of college is at once a sign of the lacunae in my knowledge of contemporary art cinema, a “you had to have been there” perfect descriptor of its form and tone, and a wistful rumination on how I might have ridden it out as a film student if the stuff we were watching and everyone else around me was making was this interesting. At the same time that it's better than all the stuff I was forced to watch back then, Shit Year nonetheless is completely of that frustrating brand of cinema: first, its title is just godawful. It's not that I don't get it—it's not a reference to excrement, and it actually describes the subject of the film perfectly, to wit a less-than-ideal year in the life of its lead character—it just reeks of “look at me being edgy” on the filmmaker's part. Second, the sound design, by Cam and Nate Archer, is at several points so intolerably irritating that I was tempted to leave, and it is so absolutely on purpose. Like, I get that you're in it for the love of cinema rather than wanting to go all Hollywood and shit, but there's a fair expanse of gray area between having an uninterrupted recording of a car horn on your soundtrack for a full minute with the fader pushed up to the top so that it's the loudest thing in the whole movie and being The Help. Just saying, Cam, you coulda cut that shit after ten seconds and still made your point, homes.
That being said, everything else about this film kinda fucking rocks. The black & white photography is gorgeous, the surreal set pieces are counterbalanced (a problematic word since they might be the same thing expressed differently, I don't know) with beautifully observed human moments between people, and the lead performance is a stunner. Ellen Barkin plays a recently retired actress who moves to the country to be alone and wear baggy pants and untied shoes and tell people to fuck off (my personal ideal retirement scenario), while reflecting on a relationship she had with a much younger actor who may or may not exist. She's visited by her guileless neighbor and wiseass brother, and an unfortunate array of extremely loud noises. That's basically it in terms of story, but that's non-narrative cinema for you, the “there” that's there is elsewhere.
In this case, that's primarily Ellen Barkin's tremendous performance as a character that, by her own admission, is very close to her heart. The character, Colleen West, is an actress approximately Barkin's age, providing her the opportunity to explore in a variety of ways just what that means. Her physicality is that of a much younger woman, at times even like a child. She dresses however the fuck she feels like—in ensembles the costume designer pulled from Barkin's own closet—and it's refreshing to see a “portrait of alienation” (phrase in quotes because it so often describes a gloomy, self-serious bum trip) where the subject is so at home in her own skin. Her face glows, and what lines are visible seem natural, rather than harsh. Archer is content to just look at Ellen Barkin for an hour or so, and I can't say as I blame the cat, especially when this is how she looks to him.
The rest of the cast are more just kind of there, which isn't necessarily a problem, considering the film is all about Barkin. Theresa Randle has an engagingly strange and spooky bit as a science-fiction character who's trying to help replicate the memory of the young guy Barkin fucked during her last play. As said young guy Harvey West (no relation), Luke Grimes mainly has to just sit there looking pretty, and since it's not really clear whether he actually exists or not, that's ok, you can just high-five Ellen Barkin and tell her “get it, girl” while dude splashes around in the swimming pool and strums and acoustic guitar and so forth. Melora Walters does a good job not being annoying as the neighbor who goes out of her way to be friendly to Barkin's character, which given that she makes “apple dolls” and jogs and drops by unannounced, is a fair achievement.
The one supporting cast member who manages to rise above that “kind of just there” level is Bob Einstein, as Barkin's brother. Dude's been stealing scenes for decades now, from his initial rise to fame as live-action Wile E. Coyote Super Dave to his current level of godhood as Curb Your Enthusiasm's Thumpin' Lumpen himself, Funkhouser. He's pretty much got “normal guy with a really loud voice” on lock, and his chemistry with Barkin is stellar.
But, with all that said, Shit Year and everything in it comes back to Barkin, and her titular fucked-up 365 days. It's not a film that's going to break box office records, for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it's a Film with a capital f, but that's not the point at all. But there was something very satisfying to the way, in the Q&A session that followed the screening I attended, Barkin responded to this one dude's long-ass question about Ingmar Bergman and what directors she and Archer studied when making the film. She was basically like, “We didn't go about it that way, we just put in the work.” And that, in a slightly vague nutshell that I can't really elaborate on further, is why Shit Year works as a Film. It may be non-linear, it may be in black and white, it may deliberately use the tools of the medium to disorient and even irritate in places, but it's not beholden to some other, older director's work. It's an entity unto itself, and—especially since it's only like an hour long—is worth seeing. Fortunately, much as I don't like it, the title totally prepares the audience for what it's getting itself into: you can't print it in the paper, it's kind of off-putting initially, but ultimately it couldn't be any other way.
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