I picked up Vanishing Waves to check out and unfortunately despite the amazing soundtrack and some great visuals was a little bit repulsed by the lead character of the film. I think that the film sincerely wants us to understand and be with the main character in his journey into the head of another comatose person, but he commits quite a few heinous and unconscionable acts during the film.
Spoilers:
Our main character is a scientist who had worked on a device to allow themselves to be projected into the mind of another (shades of The Cell) which he does by getting into an isolation tank monitored by researchers (Altered States). Once inside the person's mind he encounters a mysterious woman with whom he immediately forms a 'dream woman' bond (shades of Paperhouse, albeit almost entirely sexual). Unfortunately he decides to not tell any of the team in the real world about this encounter, instead continuing his dream-world meetings under the pretext to the rest of his team that he is not encountering anything.
In the meantime his real relationship crumbles (a little like Altered States again), and one of the interesting but not entirely developed ideas of the film is that the dream-woman is very damaged and perhaps a little insane, as shown by the (excellent) dinner table scene which starts out a little Tom Jones-y, develops into 9 & 1/2 Weeks eroticism with food and then takes a turn into vivid horror as the woman cuts her tongue with a knife (strangely similar to the moment in the recent Evil Dead remake!), before saying that she cannot feel anything and asks Lukas, the male lead, to start biting her leg as hard as he can. She also takes the hero to an orgy that starts a little like the orgy scene from Derek Jarman's Jubilee and then turns into the bizarre body melding one from the end of Society.
Oh, and also to a very Mulhollland Drive-esque nightclub! (Her beach house is also very reminiscent of Lost Highway's, albeit captured in mid-explosion!). There is also a magnificent final sequence of our hero slowly chasing down the woman across a dark beach whilst they are both completely naked, all scored to
Lila by Limousine),
The rest of the film shows our hero breaking all sorts of
other ethical rules by tracking down the real comatose person whose mind he has been projected into and eventually (major spoilers):
In another Lynchian move beating the shadowy masculine presence that has been stalking her mind to death in a move that either liberates her (which I think the film was trying to suggest) or more problematically shows our hero's wish to control her mind. When that is combined with our hero being allowed one final visit to set things right results in the final chase sequence which seems to involve killing her (for her own good?!?), I have real problems with the relationship at the heart of the film
So a beautiful but extremely frustrating film. I think I'm going to come back to the magnificent soundtrack more than the film itself from now on. In some ways, despite some beautiful moments, the film felt overpowered rather than enriched by all the sci-fi references, or at least the references that I felt were sloshing around in its tank.
And I'll also be coming back to Kristina Buozyte's first feature film The Collectress from 2008, which Artsploitation thoughtfully included on the second disc of their set. I thought this film, in contrast to Vanishing Waves, works perfectly. It features the same actor, Marius Jampolskis, in the lead role who would later play the scientist in Vanishing Waves, and The Collectress despite being a drama rather than a science fiction has a few themes that connect the two films, especially the idea of destroying your 'real life' in preference to interacting through the medium of a screen - the first scene of Vanishing Waves involves a great pan around an apartment as our hero is working on his computer as his girlfriend goes to bed. The camera revolves to take in the entire room and returns to our hero as we glimpse that he may have been looking at porn instead of being desperately busy on his project. But it is just a glimpse. And the main male lead in The Collectress is a man who edits video footage, though in such a subversive and rebellious way that his clients are never that happy with the way that their wedding videos turn out!
The Collectress interestingly also deals with a person who in some ways uses others for their own personal fulfilment, in a move that is a little like a gender swapped version of Vanishing Waves to come. Instead of the man using the woman, here our female lead, Gaile, is a rather detached speech therapist with a cold and impassive demeanour who asks for a series of videos of her teaching to be produced in order to screen them during a conference she is giving. However once she sees herself on screen, watching her icy demeanour on screen she finds herself responding emotionally to events for the first time (which seems to be suggested in the opening sequence with her father as they watch a home video to stem from childhood issues).
She approaches the video editor and cajoles/blackmails (by paying off his gambling debts and buying him new editing equipment after it has been smashed by thugs wanting their money) him into editing the video footage that she produces so that she can experience events emotionally after the fact.
However (like the main character in Vanishing Waves) the series of events that she films steadily escalates, as if she can only feel emotion when she is in control and she needs to keep upping the thrill-seeking ante on herself. She cannot 'just' be filmed. She always has to be filmed doing something that she can then react to later. This thrill-seeking itself escalates to putting other people into dangerous situations (such as riding in a sports car with her) and letting her emotionally react to their fear, or in the case of an animal, her callous killing of it.
Gaile here is just as much of a selfish character as Lukas is in Vanishing Waves, but the difference here is that the film does not seem to be celebrating that selfishness, even while it also treats Gaile with some sympathy.
Despite all of Gaile's callous acts the video editor is falling in love with her, and so draws the line after filming her having sex with an anonymous man in a bathroom for her to play back and experience. This conflict then moves through the last section of the film, also drawing in the subplot with the sister, until Gaile in a magnificent final scene is forced to lose control of the camera and be herself for someone else's viewing pleasure, and to learn to feel emotionally in the moment rather than callously commit acts to make herself feel.
That final scene feels extremely reminiscent of the final scene of Shinya Tsukamoto's A Snake of June, but also the earlier detached 'callous crime' section reminded me a lot of Cronenberg's Crash (there is also some beautiful atonal scoring that feels reminiscent of Howard Shore's score for that film), and the entire film has a strange feel of early Haneke (Benny's Video and The Piano Teacher especially) mixed with Atom Egoyan (Family Viewing and The Adjuster). But unlike Vanshing Waves these seeming connections enrich the experience of this particular film rather than overwhelm it with their own borrowed imagery.
I was extremely impressed by The Collectress and it was a wonderful decision to package it up with the perhaps more commercially viable Vanishing Waves. It even manages to make me appreciate Vanishing Waves slightly more in retrospect. While I wasn't too impressed with the main feature I'm certainly very excited to see what Kristina Buozyte will do next (apparently a segment on The ABC's of Death 2 is upcoming).
