Imperfect Harmony

Outsider filmmaker Harmony Korine returns
with the uneven but poetic Mister Lonely

by MALCOLM FRASER

Harmony Korine was a precocious enfant terrible in the late ’90s, following up his controversial script for Larry Clark’s Kids with the boldly experimental trailer-trash collage Gummo. After the equally audacious if less affecting Julien Donkey-Boy, he fell off the radar for years, reportedly into a narcotic wasteland. His return to directing, Mister Lonely (co-written with his brother Avi) is therefore weighted with expectations.

The hero is an unnamed Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who ekes out a living in Paris by busking and entertaining at a seniors’ home. Through his shady agent (Leos Carax), he meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), with whom he forms an instant bond. She convinces him to leave with her to a country estate inhabited solely by other celebrity impersonators, led by a demented “Charlie Chaplin” (Denis Lavant). Meanwhile, in a subplot wholly unrelated (at least narratively), a jungle-dwelling priest (Werner Herzog) discovers an unexpected miracle when he flies a planeload of nuns to make food deliveries.

Quite a ways into the movie, I was convinced that Korine had utterly fallen off. The punk aesthetic of his earlier films is gone, replaced by disappointingly conventional shooting and editing. A lot of the dialogue is painfully awkward, to the point that whether it’s intentionally so or not hardly matters. The whole celebrity-worship theme is beyond played out, and Korine’s affinity for outsiders and grotesques, which seemed so heartfelt in Gummo, here recalls the forced whimsy of Lasse Hallström or the nauseating indie-cuteness of Miranda July on a bad day. And Herzog, who was so darkly brilliant in Julien Donkey-Boy, seems out of place, his powerful voice and presence wasted on a fundamentally empty role.

But somehow, eventually (even after a number of false endings), I was won over. Luna and Morton’s performances bring dignity and depth to what could all too easily have been one-note caricatures, and Korine hasn’t lost his touch for beautifully poetic imagery or bizarre but somehow perfect music. And when his prankish dark side comes out, it’s deployed with more subtlety than in earlier films. Ultimately, Mister Lonely is uneven, but definitely worth seeing for Korine fans, who can only hope that he continues to develop his unique imagination.

Mister Lonely opens this Friday,
July 11 at Cinéma du Parc

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