SXSW 2005 Review: Four-Eyed Monsters

Show, don't tell. That old film-school adage lies at the textual and conceptual heart of Arin Crumley & Susan Buice's Four-Eyed Monsters, a film about two fledgling artists who dive into image-making to alternately hamper and facilitate their fall into love. Densely and devicefully edited, the opening montage alone is a testament to the power of seductive imagery to quiet a cynical mind. Images slip and slide and collide to the point where much of the time you only realise that you've seen something after it's already gone. Even as one tableau is making you laugh, you're just starting to process an earlier image that broke your heart.

Arin (Crumley) and Susan (Buice) both live in New York, but they've never met. Arin has a home videography business; he tapes other people's weddings, he professionally sculpts documentation of other people's love. Susan is a waitress at an all-night hipster diner; she spends her Saturday nights serving chocolate martinis to women on diets. Both live lonely lives, an injury made more insulting by the fact that they must do so in tiny apartments with indecorous roommates (the film perfectly captures the inelegance of living with others). Each one is all alone in one of the most populous cities in the world; neither is happy with the way things are, but making things different seems really hard.


 
Arin, at least, is making a gesture towards reaching out: he signs up for Meetster, an online dating site, and sends out messages to girls. 100 girls. Only Susan responds, passive-aggressingly suggesting that Arin could maybe meet her at her work. When it comes time to show up for their "date", Arin flips out. Wandering through Susan's restaurant, he sees her, and has no intention of approaching her, but it's clear that he's also not going to walk away. Soon enough, he's crouching behind mailboxes with his video camera, and soon after that, he's video-stalking her ride home on the JMZ.

The subway-stalking sequence is edited in such a way as to keep the viewer as anxious as Arin himself that Susan is going to find him out. The excitement builds as it goes on - the air of "is he really getting away with this?!?" becomes almost too much to bear. The fact that he does get away with it - and that, somewhat gloriously, the stalking serves to make Susan more interested in him - is a sign that the film is working in its own realm of expectation. This is the point in the film where the spectator needs to take a leap with the filmmakers - where it becomes clear that this is not your typical couple and the story of this romance is going to be at least as challenging as it is rewarding. If you can't manage that leap, this is where you get off the ride. But if you stick with them, the spoils are pretty great.

When it comes to talking about the contradictions inherent to modern city living, Four-Eyed Monsters gets a few things absolutely right. The world has changed, the old ways of relating to people no longer work. We need computers and gadgetry to be able to communicate with one another, even when we're so surrounded by people that we never feel alone.

And sex invites its own bundles of problems. Arin wants to be sexual, but pre-Susan, hasn't had much luck at it. He dreams of snogging girls on the street but is at the same time repulsed by the vulgarity of other people's sexuality. Susan is twist-tie thin and has a haircut that could only be described as indeliberate; but in Arin's head, she's a sex goddess, prancing a subway car like the stage at Scores, at once vile and irresistable. Sex is dirty but Arin wants it. He's grossed out by the fact that he wants it, but he still wants it.

I don't think it's giving much away to say that Four-Eyed Monsters is based on events taken from Crumley and Buice's real life - after all, they wrote and directed it; in it, they play characters with their own real names. Based on what the real-life couple has been saying about their film this week at SXSW, it's safe to assume that quite a lot of what we see on screen actually happened - Susan actually went to an artist's colony in Vermont, she and Arin actually exchanged video tapes through the mail, etc - but Crumley and Buice have wisely chosen to leave blurry the actual truth/fiction line.

Maybe because of that simultaneous divulgence and reticence to qualify what they've divulged, they've managed to make a unique hybrid, a personal film that taps almost painfully into the zeitgeist.  It *would* be too much to give away to describe the film's last ten minutes, but suffice it to say that as the filmmakers literally let their project collapse, I felt a little bit cheated. If you identify with Arin and Susan, you do so so completely that when they get overtly self-reflexive, it seems to cheapen what you've already allowed yourself to feel. And that, in itself, sort of kills.

Four-Eyed Monsters has one more SXSW screening, Friday afternoon at 4:30pm at the Alamo South. Check out the film's official website for more information on future screenings - we'll also have a podcast interview with the filmmakers here at Cinematical, sometime in the next few days.