Wesley Rickert’s film The Border of Utopia
patrick brennan
February 2021
“Is reality’s junk buried at utopia’s edge?”
Far from Hollowood, that’s for sure. Clearly askance from the tributary traditions of painting, photography, proscenium theater or the novel. Instead, more akin with, but not necessarily like, much of Iranian cinema’s derivation out of poetry. Rickert operates from the movement of the mind in flux as it drifts, considers, associates, conflates, wiggles in and out between dream & deliberate focus to proffer carefully interwoven sequences of images & events, the connections among which become the viewer’s to orchestrate.
Rickert, whose artistic evolution has traversed visual arts, noise music and a continuing practice as absurdist performance poet, has directed and produced five no-budget feature length films within an aesthetic he describes as Irrational Cinema. He previously operated the artist-run 253469 in Toronto, a space receptive to avant garde inclinations toward parody, disguise and evasion of categorizations that facilitate clear communication (if it’s clear, it, of course, it must not be true…). 253469 Productions now umbrellas his Thousand Island Film & Stage Artist Residency, which hosts small scale theatrical & film initiatives. The Border of Utopia has in 2020 been an official selection for Chicago’s BLOW-UP International Arthouse Filmfest and Montreal’s Independent Filmfest.
And, it follows that it’s not in any way obvious what a viewer has to know in advance to entrain well with this film’s trajectories. The Border of Utopia introduces itself as an absurdist adaptation of William Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It. But, just where might one encounter any threads of Shakespeare’s script here? Why mention the scenario at all, except perhaps as ruse, decoy, inverse accent, a conceptual banana peel diversion splayed in the viewer’s path to perhaps elicit an immediate ambience of dislocation?
Shakespeare banishes his principal characters to the forest, to a temporary utopia momentarily exempt from the brutal, hypercompetetive authoritarianism of British aristocratic rule. The Border of Utopia opens in something less than a forest with a distinctly civilian persona explicitly make believe dressed up as a soldier with a rifle stepping through high grass while indicating vigilance. Above the drone of crickets (one of the principal actors in this film) that sound continuously from beginning to end, out pops the occasional rifle shot. No apparent targets. It might just eventually dawn on the viewer that this militarist is simply patrolling Utopia’s peripheral frontier. Oh.
But, then, once again, where is As You Like It here? It’s, of course, no-place (as the literal meaning of that word utopia informs us) to be found. But, wait, three of the characters here, at the very least, share names with roles in Shakespeare’s play, the love smitten banished niece Rosalind, her father, the already exiled Duke Senior (Duke of Summer) and the shepherd Phebe, reconfigured here as Phoebe Of The Sharks. Did they come out of nowhere too?
And, these three are also significantly outnumbered by an array of non-Shakespearean personae such as Marie of Wozzeck, (as in Alban Berg’s 1922 opera, which was later resoundingly panned as “degenerate” by leading gangsters of the when-I-hear-the-word-culture-I-reach-for-my-gun National Socialist regime), along with Instant Imagination, Suitcase Jack, Athena Of Chaos and Soldiers #1 & #2.
Far from the illusions of cinematic naturalism, The Border of Utopia exaggerates the medium’s artificiality and deliberately dispenses with most of the hooks that lure and pamper a viewer’s attention. The cinematography and lighting is so deadpan that it might even allude to super-8 home movie making, yet the timing of the crosscut editing is exceptionally sharp and crisply precise.
The characters are almost punk aesthetic thrift store party wardrobed, divested of the mystique of persuasive disguise, clearly just ordinary people wearing some stuff, not themselves transformed into alternate fictious personae. They each come across more as signs, perhaps as indices for concepts or ideas, than as transformed and embodied theatrical presences.
Nor do these players dialogue, although occasionally one might gesturally acknowledge another. What the audience hears instead is a string of monologues that, for the most part, address the viewer, revealing that the principal force and momentum of this work is literary and linguistic.
The scenes and soliloquies are throughout interrupted by brief flurries of usually still images, possibly as afterthoughts or concurrent digressive free associations. Many are images of performers in various idioms, 16th and 17th century European prints and drawings, farms and farm animals, ancient Mediterranean ruins, street shots of Paris, WWI battle scenes and anti Vietnam war protests. Soldier #2 often emulates our contemporary police culture as she moves toward the camera to block its view with her hand.
Some sense of Shakespeare does tend to eak through the apparent opacity of this roving utopic extravaganza through no place. This is how Suitcase Jack aptly puts it:
No place.
A description.
I met an idea in my suitcase.
What tiny mental markets and giants prisoners?
As I pledge my word I urinated on that capital.
Ideology blown off course.
That fire was put out.
Home for a while.
In politics each night.
On good slumber terms and yet on itchy foot hot.
This idea traveling.
I say no, Joe,
but murder by dense audience.
Cubic zirconia sparkle home shopping
no place visiting rings cheap.
Around forty birthdays of double icing sugar
of two minus two equals a bonus.
They did not squeeze the fruit and they did not fuck.
Xenophones.
Ion of Chios.
A good signature poem.
Films without performers.
Moonbirds without moons
and plums without pudding.
Lazy Lilliputians without Shakespeare
or brass knuckle Gandhis.
This makes us look better.
And acting narrower part of valor.
Yes, no place was above that place.
Lilliputia throwing rocks on heroes.
And so our lines did choke,
Julius Caesar, Brutus, and Hamlet,
those three ghosts did shriek and haunt my paybook,
Some muted race of floating yahoo horses rigged racing.
They know English but the guy was ignorant in French.
Only soft boiled eggs cracked.
By up or by utopia?
Toward the latter third of the film, where this explicit mentioning of “no place” begins to emerge, there is a mild acceleration in pace and diversification of filmic invention and surprise, most notably for this viewer where reversed recording of speech is drolly accompanied by subtitles.
Rickert is admirably and thoroughly consistent in his development and treatment of every component of this production, demonstrating that he has evolved a firm conception of what he intends to accomplish along with an accompanying necessary commitment to its realization. Not so simple or easy a feat.
CAST
Ulysses Castellanos – Instant Imagination
Meghan de Chastelain – Phoebe Of The Sharks
Tess Danforth – Rosalind
Joanna Decc – Athena Of Chaos
Evan Lepp – Suitcase Jack
Ermina Pérez -Marie Of Wozzeck
Kathleen Reichelt – Soldier #2
Nils Riess – Duke Of Summer
George Worrall – Soldier #1
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patrick brennan coordinates ensembles, composes & plays the alto saxophone, pursuing a contrarian and independent musical path toward evolving a distinct musical language that explores multidirectional thinking, organization, time, sound, line & rhythm. Recordings include terraphonia (Creative Sources), muhheankuntuk (Clean Feed), .which way what, and Sudani (deep dish). He leads the ensembles s0nic 0penings & transparency kestra and performs solo as rōnin phasing. The audio edition of his book Ways & Sounds is available for free download at Bandcamp
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