The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
Final Flesh (2009)
Directed by Vernon Chatman
Between 2002 and 2009, stand-up performer and television comedy writer Chatman sent a screenplay about a family unit preparing for an atom bomb’s drop to Internet-found porn enterprises charged with staging clients’ fantasies. The resulting low-grade video work Final Flesh presents, in “exquisite corpse” fashion, the Pollard family’s three members (daughter, father, mother) as played by four different ensembles of pointedly unnamed actors. The one African-American and three Caucasian-American trios appear onscreen for about fifteen minutes each in the roles of people awakening in their living room uncertain as to whether they are dead yet or still alive. Their efforts to find out involve strange role-playing games and myriad non sequiters, which are delivered in awkward, wooden fashion with transfixing documental power. The people’s explorations raise more profound questions than naked parts: Can one ever return to the womb? What does God think of seeing people in the nude, and does He (or She) have a body of note? How do we live with knowing that we are raw meat? Is death a prenatal memory? Birth a coincidence? The Surrealist sense that Final Flesh conveys is one of life itself being absurd. Aaron Cutler (March 25, midnight; March 27, 7:30pm at the Spectacle)