SIFF: The Joy of Life

Jenni Olson draws a stark portrait of loneliness and despair, tinged with hope, in The Joy of Life, a stunning experimental film that seamlessly blends the spoken diary of a lonely butch dyke voiced by Harriet "Harry" Dodge (By Hook or By Crook, Cecil B. Demented) , beautifully relevant cinematography, a poem read over a black screen by legendary Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the story behind the Frank Capra movie Meet John Doe, and the history of suicide at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

Olson herself describes The Joy of Life as having three parts. The bookends are the spoken diary of a butch dyke and the history of suicide at San Francisco's most famous landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge. Bridging the two halves is a poem about San Francisco very appropriately read by Ferlinghetti, named San Francisco's Poet Laureate in 1998. Ferlinghetti, who published Allen Ginsberg's controverisal Howl in 1956, leading to a landmark First Amendment case, and whose book A Coney Island of the Mind is still one of the most popular books of poetry in the U.S. today, is the perfect choice to voice a segment of this film that is an ode to San Francisco, in the midst of its juxtaposed stories of loneliness and suicide.

The Joy of Life is not a light-and-fluffy film, and it won't appeal to a lot of mainstream moviegoers. There are no car chases, no gunfights, no gangsta rappers playing cops, no witty dialouge - no people at all, really, save the lonely voice of Olson's narrator and the ghosts of those who have died jumping off the bridge. I've read reviews of The Joy of Life critcizing it as nothing more than endless shots of San Francisco; those reviews really miss meaning of the film.

This is the kind of film you need to just sit back and let wash over you. It's a human tale of an aching loneliness and search for fulfillment echoed by the empty streets of a city teeming with life; it borders on despair at times - and yet Olsen is clearly so hopeful that there is more, that there is life worth living. Olson seamlessly blends the three parts of her film into one full circle; The Joy of Life, in the end, is a tale not of suicide and despair, but of life and hope.

Olson's film was preceded by a showing of two intriguing short films. The first, a powerful four-minute documentary titled How Not to Kill Yourself, is a blunt look at the aftermath of a suicide on the one year anniversary of the victim's death. The anger and sorrow of those he left behind are conveyed unflinchingly and unsentimally here - there are no "Oh, we miss him so much" moments; just the scathing desolation of people whose lives were ripped to shreds by the suicide of their loved one.

Filmmaker Julie Talen captures hauntingly the emptiness a suicide victim leaves behind when she breaks up a scene of the cousin of the victim and the cousin's mother talking about the death into three frames, with the middle frame notably empty; and later when she uses the same effect to show the victim's father, a photo of the young man taken sometime shortly before his death, and a photo of the same man as a young boy. The father's sadness is tearing, and this brief short left the audience solemnly contemplating the endless aftermath of the choice of one person to end his life.

The second short, an 11-minute film called We are the Littletons: A True Story, is the story of rigid intolerance in a fundamentalist family, told through the eye of a Penny, a young artist who has come to stay as a tenant in their picturesque farmhouse while the family is in Singapore. The observer shows us a home with gothic undertones, where picture-perfect rooms are labeled with names like "Lilac Room" and "Strawberry Room"; and the mother of the family speaks with love and longing of her tulips blooming in the spring, while warning the tenant to call the police at once if the family's elder daughter, Eve, should happen to show up.

Mrs. Littleton tells her young tenant warningly in a letter about her wayward elder daughter, who, she says, is a compulsive liar and a sociapath. "I understand exactly what you mean," Penny tells Mrs. Littleton in a letter written in reply, as she goes on to reveal to Mrs. Littleton that her own mother suffers from similar problems, and that she well understands the heartache that such person can cause.

As Penny explores her way through the remnants of Eve's life through the bits and pieces of her saved throughout the house by her father, who, one surmises from one of Mrs. Littleton's letters, feels a bit more softly toward his daughter than his wife, the pieces of this family's story - sadly, probably not an entirely atypically tale of heartache wrought by intolerance - come together into a revealing conclusion.

Filmmaker Penny Lane, an MFA candidate in Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, also recently produced and directed The Abortion Diaries, a full-length feature documentary about women's experiences with abortion.