Sex, Love & Z‑Parts

A few weeks ago I received a request to review a short film that acts as a teas­er for a fea­ture film called Sex, Love & Z‑Parts. I received the screen­er last week, along with com­pre­hen­sive sup­ple­men­tal mate­ri­als and have also trad­ed a few emails with Mar­cus D. Rus­sell, the dri­ving force behind the pro­duc­tion. So here’s the review:

Sex, Love & Z‑Parts imme­di­ate­ly recalls Soder­bergh’s Sex, Lies and Video­tape, but since I’ve not seen that film, I can’t speak to any oth­er par­al­lels. This is like­ly for the best, since I know of few things that inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers hate more than being accused of deriv­a­tive style. The first thing you notice about this film is the qual­i­ty of the pro­duc­tion val­ues. The film­mak­ers are only ama­teur in the sense that no stu­dio is pay­ing them to do the work. It is obvi­ous that each aspect of the pro­duc­tion was cho­sen care­ful­ly, from the film stock to the pac­ing of the action. This care has enabled the film­mak­ers to pro­vide a space in which the sto­ry can be told through mul­ti­ple sub­jec­tiv­i­ties.

The style and con­tent is informed by a care­ful ren­der­ing and expo­si­tion of Gen­er­a­tion X traits, enu­mer­at­ed in the the­sis that was part of the sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als:

The films of Gen­er­a­tion X have the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics:

1) Con­spic­u­ous absence of parental fig­ures…

2) Long­ing for the icono­graph­ic male brava­do com­mon­place in the cin­e­ma that pre­ced­ed it…

3) The ever-present sense of fail­ure…

4) The issue of man­hood. How would a man act?…

5) An inabil­i­ty to mold into the Amer­i­can frame­work…

6) The rela­tion­ship prob­lem…

This man­i­festo was informed by Dogme 95, but Big Hit’s ideas focus on more exis­ten­tial themes than cin­e­mat­ic require­ments. It is pos­si­ble to see glimpses of this in the short­ened fea­ture I was sent, and while it will take the full film to flesh out and prove whether or not Mar­cus and his crew have been accu­rate as well as pre­cise in their tar­get­ing, they are cer­tain­ly doing more with this film than most oth­er inde­pen­dents.

From an email:

Scott and I did­n’t think we could real­ly get out point across with­out extreme­ly high pro­duc­tion val­ues. They are so used to grainy dig­i­tal images that they fall in love with the prettiness.…that gives us an edge and a lev­el of trust that is tough to cre­ate in indie film. We real­ly try to emu­late some of the pop­u­lar looks/setups of film and TV..and then invert the mean­ing.

This is an inter­est­ing film because you are real­ly not sup­posed to do this kind of shit on the short film cir­cuit. The expec­ta­tion is that you are an amateur…so you can imag­ine that they aren’t exact­ly hap­py that two loud mouth guys from LA…are puttin’ it down in the frame.

Per­son­al­ly, com­ing from some­one born at the ass-end of the Gen X curve, they seem to have the bag­gage behind the label under their thumbs. The pro­longed ado­les­cent estrange­ment from the baby boomer world­view and simul­ta­ne­ous implant­ed desire to live up to it, the strug­gle for agency, authen­tic­i­ty and loy­al­ty in spite of it all resound strong­ly in SLZP. The mis­sion of Gen X, to me, seems to be the process of defin­ing what it means to be an adult in a life that has had a dis­tinct lack of them. Thanks in part to their choice of film stock [“East­man Kodak 7278 (500 Tung­sten bal­ance) for the inte­ri­ors and the night shoots… East­man Kodak 7274 (200 Tung­sten bal­ance) for the ext/day stuff”] the film almost feels like it was shot in the ear­ly 80s, seems to say “this is how we would have done things [includ­ing make movies] if we were adults when we were chil­dren. They might not be the best choic­es, but we’ll roll with it and accept the world for what it is.” And if that isn’t Gen X, I don’t know what is.

I shut­tled the screen­er off to Tremont Inde­pen­dent, maybe it’ll show at their Decem­ber screen­ing.