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CAPSULE: SYLVIO (2017)

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Sylvio is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

DIRECTED BY: , Albert Birney

FEATURING: Sylvio Bernardi, Kentucker Audley

PLOT: A gorilla who works for a debt collection agency accidentally stumbles on to a small-town television broadcast, but his shot at fame comes with conditions.

COMMENTS: “Feel good” movies are almost always a dispiriting experience for the weird viewer. Saccharine story lines, all-too-earnest performances, and finales which crash over the viewer on a tide of sweepy-weepy strings. Similarly, hipster comedies with the “quirk” set to eleven exasperate. By subverting these expectations, Sylvio, by and large, succeeds. While the film’s story is a bit by the books (and, admittedly, a touch saccharine), it has an easy charm that carries the story through all the notes required for a “feel good” hipster movie without eliciting eye-rolls from even your jaundiced reviewer, who has endured a panoply low-to-no-budget oddball meanderings.

Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney have made a quiet film about a quiet gorilla—one who reluctantly works at a debt collection agency. Sylvio Bernardi (who plays himself) is a mellow man-beast. He likes soft synth music, has a pet goldfish, and spends his free hours making episodes of “Quiet Times with Herbert Herpels,” a silent puppet vignette series devised, it seems, for an audience of one. Utterly unruthless, he is an awkward fit at his job. But what turns out to be his final collection assignment gives him a chance to live his small dream of telling his stories. Unfortunately, he gains his fame by breaking things on set (accidentally, mind you), and has to work out just what kind of local fame he wants to attain.

Sylvio is a buddy comedy, chronicling the relationship between Sylvio and the local television host, Al Reynolds—a similarly soft-spoken fellow who, as his lack of sponsorship indicates, probably wasn’t made for this time and place. The hook, of course, is that Sylvio is a gorilla: a gorilla whose demeanor flies in the face of his species’ fearsome reputation. Whoever Bernardi is, he plays it straight—without which the whole project would collapse. Everyone else plays it straight, as well. The whole exercise is an examination of TV excitement, à la Bart Simpson’s “I Didn’t Do It” brush with fame on The Simpsons.

It’s a simple story, with enough laughs along the way to justify itself. What tips my view firmly on the favorable side is the quality of the craftsmanship. Sylvio’s own excess efforts are put into the “Quiet Times” experience (these interludes heighten the weird quotient, particularly the dream sequence during which Sylvio meets a real-life Herbert Herpels as a mute spirit guide). Audley and Birney not only make this quiet drollery with commendable competence, but also display a keen eye for framing. In one dramatic scene, the focal points of Herbert resting on the hood of a car, the form of Sylvio digging a grave for his puppet, and a shining moon in the upper right corner of the frame make for an observational experience worthy of any top tier production: Sylvio is on the cusp abandoning his dream, but stops himself. I suspect that Sylvio‘s filmmakers faced countless moments of doubt themselves. But thankfully they stopped themselves from burying this curiosity, and so their own quiet story can be seen by anyone seeking an eccentric, easy-going, and, yes, feel good experience.

Sylvio failed to find a home on video after its release, but the indie success of Strawberry Mansion reignited interest in Birney and Audley’s first feature. It’s now on VOD and will be released on Blu-ray January 31 by Music Box Films.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Curios don’t get much more curious than ‘Sylvio,’ which has the distinction of being both the weirdest, and most affecting, feature ever made starring a man in a monkey suit — or, to be more precise, a man in a monkey suit wearing a monkey suit… It won’t attract more than a niche audience, but a cult following for this bizarro effort seems quite possible.”–Nick Schager, Variety (contemporaneous)

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FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL 2021: STRAWBERRY MANSION (2021)

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DIRECTED BY: , Albert Birney

FEATURING: Kentucker Audley, Penny Fuller, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney, Linas Phillips

PLOT: In the future, dreams are taxed, and when a dream auditor goes to check in on an elderly woman who’s off the grid, he finds himself drawn to dreams that are more free than his own.

Still from Strawberry Mansion (2021)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: With themes reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a handmade aesthetic straight from The Science of Sleep, Strawberry Mansion is the 2020s American indie version of a turn-of-the-millennium Michel Gondry movie. It may be a tribute, but it’s a worthy trip of its own.

COMMENTS: Dream movies are tricky, and making a dream movie on a low budget is even trickier. Strawberry Mansion addresses these limitations up front. The introductory dream is minimalist: an everyday kitchen, but painted entirely pink, into which comes a friendly visitor bearing a bucket of fried chicken. Throughout the movie, dreams will be conveyed using these types of simple props and sets thrown together in incongruous ways: actors dressed as Halloween-costume frogs (playing saxophones) or mice (in sailor suits); walking shrubs; demons with turquoise light-bulb eyes. Add in the occasional stop-motion animated skeleton or caterpillar to go along with some simple green screen, and you’ve proven that you can convey an otherwordly feel without millions of dollars of CGI.

The second scene addresses the non-budgetary conundrum dream movies face: the cliché of slippage between the waking world and the dream world, and the idea that the audience must be on guard to discriminate between the two. Our hero (a bureaucrat with the Brazil-ish name “Preble”) awakes to find himself craving chicken, and goes to Cap’n Kelly’s drive-thru, where the A.I. clerk tries to sell him a brand new “Chicken Shake.” Chowing down in the parking lot, he has a brief flash-forward hallucination—and that’s it, as far as the old “blurring the lines between dream and reality” bit goes. There is no “real’ world in Strawberry Mansion to confuse with the dream world. The premise of this near-future vision isn’t dystopian science fiction, but light absurdist satire. The very idea of taxes on dreams—dream of a buffalo, and you’re assessed a twenty-five cent bill; dandelions are three cents apiece—is something that would only occur to you in a dream. There’s no narrative confusion about whether we’re in the characters’ dreams or the movie’s reality, and there’s also never any sense that we’re meant to take this cinematic world as more than a dream itself. This dream-inside-a-dream structure frees us up to experience the movie on its own terms, instead of falling into the psychological thriller trap of trying to distinguish what is a dream from what is “really happening.”

As Preble, Audley is rather bland as a slouchy, glum bureaucrat, but that’s by design; his character contrasts with the grandiose poetry of dreams, which go beyond workaday realities. Penny Fuller‘s eccentric Arabella—when he asks her what she does during the intake interview, she describes herself as an “atmosphere creator,” so he jots down “artist” on his form’s “occupation” line—is the sweet but slightly ridiculous woman who will seduce him into a more fulfilling mode of being human. Strawberry Mansion is a manifesto for resisting the numbing effects of modern technology—represented explicitly by advertising—in favor of the playful freedom of imagination. This message is wrapped in a sugary confection about a man and a woman who have a deep but chaste romance based on shared dreams rather than the passions of the physical world. It’s funny, gentle, and filled with funny, gentle dreams to tickle your imagination. It may be the best dream you’ll have this year, and it’s well worth the bill.

Kentucker Audley is best known as an actor in indie circles, but he also founded the website NoBudge, which curates low-budget (and often weird) short films from up-and-coming directors. Audley and co-writer/co-director Albert Birney previously collaborated on the absurdist comedy Silvio (2017), about a gorilla news anchor going through an existential crisis. Strawberry Mansion is inexplicably named after a Philadelphia neighborhood. It debuted at Sundance and already has a distributor (Music Box), so expect to see it available to the general public later this year, by early 2022 by the very latest.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Many will surely find the metaphysical derring-do and aggressive weirdness of Strawberry Mansion too much of an ask, but for those prepared to dive down its nutso rabbit-hole, it offers a divertingly free-wheeling vision.”–Shaun Munro, Flickering Myth (festival screening)