Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway‘s Miguel Llansó returns to talk with Giles Edwards about his latest film, Infinite Summer, a more restrained (but still wild) film about a meditation app that takes you to a purple nebula.
FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: INFINITE SUMMER (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Miguel Llansó
FEATURING: Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock, Johanna Rosin, Hannah Gross, Ciaron Davies
PLOT: Mia, an anthropology student partying with her friends for one last summer, finds her revels sabotaged by the mysterious and powerful mood app, “Eleusis.”
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Though not as dingbat nutso as Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway, Llansó’s latest film examines the promise and dangers of technology with plenty of pizzazz, paranormality, and purple gasses.
COMMENTS: Had someone like Ray Bradbury written this, its title could well have been The New Zoo Will Be Free from Suffering. Miguel Llansó, however, has more of a playful—and optimistic—streak than many science fiction writers. His new film is grounded in a realistic here and now, and indeed its opening act plays like a simple coming of age story about three young woman who have just graduated. But as the filmmaker says, “I am no psychologist,” and his deeply rooted bent toward the techno-fantastic quickly rears its head, sending his protagonists and the viewer on a strange and sinister ride through a purple cloud of menace.
This menace (or promise?) is dubbed “Eleusis.” As explained by its chirpy, casual AI guide, it claims to be a guided meditation app. Doctor Mindfulness, who probably isn’t an actual doctor, brings this questionable product—the program’s delivery system is a vapor-cartridge loaded in breathing mask—to Mia and her buddies, who are rightly hesitant about trusting some sketchy beardo they meet on the “Extreme Dating” VR app. Doctor Mindfulness’ insistence overcomes Mia’s trepidation, and the next thing we know, Mia gives Eleusis a try, and begins exploring the possibilities of the purple dust vortex projected in the aether. Her friends overcome their hesitation, too, and under the guidance of the good “doctor,” push the tech to its meditative, orgasmic extremes. Then events take a turn for the worse.
Seeing as we’re watching a speculative science fiction film, it’s reasonable to guess that the changes and effects from a nebulous nebula aren’t going to be good; but seeing as we’re watching a Llansó film, it’s also reasonable to guess that things are going to get a bit wild. Having emphasized the color scheme, I won’t be giving too much away when I say this movie makes mention of the pineal gland, which is stimulated to both summon Eleusis from beyond, and suck in the app users when they reach a certain level of “transcendence.” Eleusis is disarming, with a bubbly feminine voice, often ending its sentences with a reassuring “yo!” to emphasize how hip and harmless it is. It’s a fascinating creature, with a mesmerizing interface—and also a deep cave of lightning and purple that may hold the answers Mia seeks after her friends begin changing.
A compelling character roster fleshes out Llansó’s probe into this theoretical. Mia’s father is an easy-going artist, with his authority tempered by his insecurities. Doctor Mindfulness hits all the notes for a techno-optimist, following the instructions of Eleusis without question. And a pair of Interpol agents add an eccentric buddy-cop element: one of them is both always late, and always eating the other’s food. Infinite Summer has much to offer, much of it in a purple haze. In Mia, Llansó captures our obsession with the past; in the hungry Interpol agent, he captures our enchainment to the present; and in Eleusis, he imagines a future gathering place, between reality and the void: a new zoo, which will be free from some suffering.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I KNOW WHY THE CHAINSAW SINGS
It takes pluck, self-confidence, and a decade of your life to learn everything you need to know about all the angles of production. Filmmaker Sander Maran and his brother, actor and producer Peeter, have much to say about Chainsaws Were Singing, their adventure in musical comedy filmmaking.
Includes bonus film introductory remarks and following Q&A.
SATURDAY SHORT: DOGS (2024)
This is the way commercials should be done: the company foots the bill for the director to film a two minute nightmare about fuzzy muppet-dog hybrids stealing paperwork, then sticks their name on it in the last five seconds.
FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAINSAWS WERE SINGING (2024)
Mootorsaed laulsid
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Chainsaws Were Singing is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Sander Maran
FEATURING: Karl Ilves, Laura Niils, Martin Ruus, Janno Puusepp,
Rita Rätsepp
PLOT: Tom and Maria meet and fall in love after each has had the worst day of their lives, not knowing events are going to turn for the even worse when they cross paths with a chainsaw-wielding cannibal.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Oof, feeling lazy here, so from this wide menu I’ll proffer, “refrigerator-bound bukkake god” and “throat-piercing lesbo-hedgehog.”
COMMENTS: One-hundred and eighty hours of footage, then a three-hour first draft, and then landing just shy of the two-hour mark: Sander Maran obviously has a song to sing, inspired by his love of pleasantly idiotic comedy musicals. This story of two lost souls coming together is more than reminiscent of Cannibal! the Musical, but is also very much its own thing. At its Fantasia screening, the hoots, hollers, and theater-wide laughs in response to the odd touches and permeating sense of eccentric madcap made its qualities as entertainment clear.
I would like to start by telling you about Jaan, a gaunt goof who meets the hero whilst passing by in his car. Stopping for this hitchhiker, he laments that his love of the act (of hitchhiking, of course) is thwarted by his being too ugly to be picked up by passersby. Jaan has something to say at every situation, rambling from one topic to another at times with a speed matched only by his ever changing costume. This quirk is on decreasingly subtle display, as somewhere around the mid-way point the audience can delight in his “dextrous” changing of the duds mid-conversation with other characters. He has a string of bad luck, too: just about every vehicle he exits during Chainsaws Were Singing ends up exploding violently, always hucking a flaming tire at his feet. Supernatural, or not, Jaan’s presence on camera guarantees something silly, strange, and usually both.
Chainsaws Were Singing also manages a number of unexpected tonal shifts. When the heroine is trapped in the basement of a sinister family, Maran shifts the film’s gears on a dime, and for some fifteen minutes showcases some real, menacing, straight-up horror when introducing the evil matriarch. Horror lampoonery veers into broader lampoonery, such as when Maran introduces the mysterious man, Cobra, whose absurd tale about the wartime death of his fifteen year old brother (in some conflict between Portugal and Sweden) could pass for a Buñuel monologue.
Returning to my earlier laziness, I’ll wrap up here with a, “C’mon, everyone” coda. There is gore galore, silly comedy, ill-fated lovers, Quixotic questing, finger-food, dark pasts, gore galore, your friendly Wandering Gun Man, breezy musical numbers (“Tapa Tapa Tapa!”), tension, massacres, more gore galore, and, as I’ve already mentioned, a very helpful lesbo-hedgehog. In his cross between The Sound of Music and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Maran offers everything you could want in a wacky and weird genre frolick.
[Cue Orchestra.]
Wait, stop.
Down your instruments; I forgot to mention the bukkake.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: