DIRECTED BY: Dan Zukovic
FEATURING: Sara Strange, Dan Zukovic, Kurt Max Runte
PLOT: Three people are drawn together by their obsession with artistic imagery and the persistence of memory into a web of deceit, manipulation, and violence.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With meticulous visuals, florid dialogue, and a mannered indifference to others, Dark Arc is certainly not a typical movie. Most of the strangeness, however, lies in its attitude, which may be strikingly aggressive toward its audience, but isn’t particularly “weird” for the purposes of our list.
COMMENTS: I have a vivid memory of my first visceral reaction to a piece of art. Several pieces, actually. It was at the MoMA in New York, and I wandered into a room filled with paintings by Piet Mondrian, an artist who I had previously mocked as being easily reproduced with three primary colors and a roll of gaffer tape. But walking into a gallery filled with five or six of these abstract window-like creations, I was immediately struck by their power. Given their resemblance to stained glass, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to call it a sacred experience.
Watching Dark Arc, I suspect that writer-director-star-songwriter Dan Zukovic—or at least his pretentious blowhard art critic character—would mock my reaction and attempt to trap me in a room full of red, yellow, and blue squares. His movie, ostensibly about the power of art but more accurately a look at unchecked obsession, exudes great hostility for… well, everyone, really, but especially anyone who is committed to a vision or a goal. Our heroes are poorly or not-at-all employed, indifferent to or contemptuous of the rest of humanity, and barely tolerant of themselves. So art is less of an escape and more of a millstone around their necks.
Dark Arc is frequently referred to as a comedy, and I suppose it might be, in the Chekhovian sense of featuring pathetic people who are trapped by their own absurdities. Viscount Laris, the ex-critic whom Zukovic plays like a vampiric John C. McGinley, even references Chekhov’s gun when he references a narwhal tusk that will “go off in the final act.” (It doesn’t, entirely.) But Zukovic treats these people with deadly seriousness. Laris and Lamia, the “no-sex escort” whom he enlists in a strange campaign to screw with the head of a graphic designer who he once encountered in his youth, spar with dialogue like screwball comedians with advanced degrees, but they are absolutely committed to the nastiness of their scheming. The movie emerges as a quasi-spin on Dangerous Liaisons, particularly in the film’s finale, which reads as a sort of punishment for having ever interacted with a piece of art.
It’s tempting to assign more prescient thoughtfulness to the picture than was probably intended. Dark Arc posits that art has the ability to burn itself into our brains, and its stars go to extraordinary lengths to recapture the initial power of an image. Like fans obsessed with their favorite blockbuster franchise or smartphone owners who can’t tears their gaze away from the screen, these characters are in thrall to the visuals, and their efforts to re-create them are so all-consuming as to evoke a drug addict’s chase for the thrill of that first high. Their actions are equally anti-social, not just isolating but actively against society.
And give credit to Zukovic for having an eye for a picture. In a film so dependent upon the conviction that someone could throw away their own life for an image, he’s come up with some powerful ones to make the case. The most potent is the keystone image of Strange alone in a colorless field, arrestingly unmissable in a shocking pink raincoat, a snapshot that could have been plucked right out of Pleasantville. It’s hardly surprising that the tableau opens and closes the film, in addition to its many recurrences.
But one image does not a great or even a weird film make, and Dark Arc can’t wring much out of a conflict that is ultimately so evitable. In fact, the film walks such a straight line to its conclusion as to make a lie out of its title: these are dark people, walking deliberately and unwaveringly toward a dark end, but there is no arc. Nobody changes, nobody advances, nobody has a single thought that would dispute Zukovic’s thesis that everyone is awful. One might argue that there’s more of an arc in a bunch of black lines and colored squares.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by David Veleker, who called it “an extremely bizarre, psycho-surreal noir-ish Art Film… Great twisted stuff.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)