SIFF: Assets and Liabilities, Barbara Forever
SIFF #3
Assets and Liabilities (Zach Weintraub):
In a better world, we’d have many more independent films like Zach Weintraub’s Assets & Liabilities. This is a film with formal flourishes but isn’t over-directed, funny and anxious, but not solipsistic. It’s set in a specific time and place (a present-day gentrified Tacoma), with people and places that feel real rather than written.
Assets & Liabilities lies squarely within the lineage of the bourgeois guilt film, one that, like Radu Jude’s recent Kontinental ‘25, takes the genre to the realm of farce. Both films actually start with an eviction. In Assets, Zach, a former skateboarder turned suburban tech dad played by Weintraub himself, hops on a call to inquire about selling a piece of property, the sale of which would evict his current tenants. Though Zach is superficially torn between his personal finance and the well-being of his tenants, his general disillusion is revealed through the framing of the call: a close-up of a computer screen as Zach begins to play an online game.
Zach is unhappy with his sterile, corporate life. Working from home over Slack and wiping his daughter’s excrement into the toilet, his cognitive dissonance is filtered through extreme fish-eye lenses and disembodied close-ups. The approach resembles Martel’s The Headless Woman injected with the relaxer sensibility of Joel Potrykus. What Zach longs for is a return to his skater roots. When his wife and daughter leave for a short vacation, he takes the opportunity to spend his days jerking off to kinky porn and going to the skate park. There, he befriends a younger skater who, in a sick twist of fate, is the tenant he’s about to evict.
Assets’ sardonic tone is encapsulated in a scene where Zach and his new friend place a curse on the evil landlord. Zach is left giving himself half-hearted punishments, all of which are enacted in the film’s denouement, a stoner, horror-inflected humiliation ritual that unleashes manifestations of Zach’s repression onto his humdrum suburban life. As impressive as the film’s tonal modulation and the movement through Zach’s townhouse (occasionally through baby monitors!) is Weintraub’s self-effacing physical performance, which completes the film’s ruthless treatment of its protagonist. Zach’s excuses are depicted as nothing less than pitiful and Weintraub almost relishes in his character’s pathetic spiral.
One of Assets’ telling virtues is its market-unfriendly runtime. At a lean 61 minutes, it lies in that difficult lane of the mid-length feature. This isn’t a film that stretches itself to make a grand statement, nor one that feels like its performing to an imagined audience. It’s one of the clear highlights of the festival.
Assets and Liabilities screens at SIFF May 12th and 13th.
Barbara Forever (Byrdie O’Connor):
As a recent article in the New York Times has soberingly exhibited, many cinema-goers, even serious cinephiles, have little context for avant-garde cinema. It’s easy to understand the impetus behind a documentary like Barbara Forever, which provides a rare introduction to a towering figure in the field.
The lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer is profiled here in her own words, through retrospective voice-over narration from Hammer herself accompanied by a mix of archival footage and material from her films. Barbara Forever is largely hagiographic, informing us of Hammer’s introductions to second-wave feminism and lesbianism, her difficulty integrating into the male-dominated avant-garde in the 80s, the breakthrough of Nitrate Kisses, all the way to her fight against ovarian cancer and her influence on the next generation of queer filmmakers.
While I personally hoped for a more formally-daring portrait of a formally-daring artist, it’s a pleasure to spend time with Hammer and her images. Perhaps one could argue that that O’Connor is repurposing Nitrate Kisses’ similar voice-over montage format, and one of the film’s segments near the end about a next generation harnessing Hammer’s images would support this, but the film also needs more frisson in its sound/image relations. Nevertheless, it’s wonderful to see Hammer’s private archives, which include footage of her convincing her friends to star in her films, a sweet elementary school film screening, and moving images of her aging body. The fluidity with which O’Connor stitches together Hammer’s archives and her films is the documentary’s greatest strength.
Barbara Forever screens at SIFF May 8th and 11th.