Existential crises have long proved fertile ground for compelling cinema, and two recent Sundance breakthroughs—Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of her Beauty and Tim Sutton’s Memphis—adopt refreshingly original approaches to illuminating the dilemmas of struggling artists.
Six long years in the making, Nance’s debut premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. It’s a tricky one to capsulize, but…it’s ostensibly about the complications of a romantic relationship as viewed from the perspective of its charismatic star/director, who is desperately trying to capture all the complex emotions and eventualities on camera.
As an indication of just how formally playful the film is, the opening passages are interrupted by a VHS-like freeze-frame, then a voiceover which politely explains that we’re not currently watching An Oversimplification of Her Beauty at all, but rather a short entitled How Would You Feel?, made by Nance back in 2006. This film, we are informed, will “examine how humans come to experience a singular emotion.” The emotion is love, and the object of Nance’s affection is his collaborator and muse Namik Minter (who also gets a chance to tell her story in another short film-within-a film.)
The Oversimplification of its title is a cheeky misdirection, for “simple” is the one thing it isn’t. Rather, it plays as a kaleidoscopic bricolage of documentary, direct address, Afrofuturist-inspired animation, and diverse musical choices ranging from experimental hip-hop maestro Flying Lotus to Nance’s own band (you’re left wondering whether there’s anything he can’t do). Nance remains self-effacing throughout, whether lugging an unconstructed bed around the New York subway system (only to later reveal he has no idea how to build it), or baring his soul in increasingly excruciating confessionals.
Though yet to follow An Oversimplification with a new feature, Nance has remained creatively active, directing music videos for the likes of Pharoahe Monch and Cody ChesnuTT, and shooting short films, often with an explicitly political bent (see this poetic, monochrome take on the Black Friday Blackout protest). He’s also responsible for one of 2014’s best pieces of film criticism: a scathingly funny evisceration of the representational strategy of Ridley Scott’s recent minstrel-fest Exodus: Gods and Kings.
On paper, An Oversimplification would seem to be a natural relative of Tim Sutton’s second feature Memphis: It, too, is a study of a talented African-American artist (also playing himself) struggling to balance his creative and romantic endeavors. Yet the latter, which debuted at Sundance 2014, is a far more somber proposition: a bleak, slurred hangover of a film.
Memphis focuses on real-life soul singer (and Wesley Snipes dead ringer) Willis Earl Beal as he undergoes a profound existential and artistic crisis in slow motion. It begins with a TV interview in which the initially laid-back singer playfully burnishes his own legend, before proclaiming that “all life is artifice.” Appositely, the ensuing, wispy narrative unfolds in the ambiguous chasm between artifice and reality; the extent to which this docudrama is strictly biographical is never made explicit. However, Sutton palpably aims, with much success, for a vibe of unvarnished realism, as evidenced by his unobtrusive style and the casting of nonprofessional actors. The film’s version of Beal, meanwhile, is swiftly revealed to be a feckless wanderer with a nasty case of creative block, a girlfriend to whom he can’t/won’t commit, and a reluctance to rejoin the Baptist church which is the locus of his economically disadvantaged local community.
Aside from the magnetic (and extremely vocally talented) star, Memphis’s MVP is arguably cinematographer Chris Dapkins, who bathes proceedings in a lustrous glow which might lazily be described as Malickian, or, more specifically, reminiscent of Tim Orr’s work with David Gordon Green (especially in George Washington and All the Real Girls). There are also sparks of observational humor, like the hilarious sequence in which an elderly, disgruntled musician blows up at Beal’s modernist, improvisational singing style—it’s a rare moment when the film’s gentle tempo rises above a scrupulously even level. Even so, this flash of levity is immediately superseded by a haunting sequence of Beal giving a ferocious vocal performance with the sound entirely out of sync with the image. In Beal’s world, disjunction lies at every turn.
If at times a little too indulgent of Beal’s self-excoriating, apocalyptic rants (he occasionally comes across like the soul version of Johnny, the central figure of Mike Leigh’s Naked), Memphis hits its peaks when impressionistically inferring Beal’s disaffection via smart use of form, as in the superb framing and compositions: empty rooms and forest lands have rarely looked more forbidding. Elsewhere, as in Charles Burnett’s 1977 classic Killer of Sheep (an obvious influence on Memphis), images of children at play are repeatedly utilized as ambiguous totems of either an innocent, hopeful future, or emotional regression and vulnerability. Sutton—and Beal—leave it up to the viewer to decide.
An Oversimplification of her Beauty and Memphis are available to stream on Fandor. If you’re interested, do sign up for this streaming service at 30% discount price. Go here to receive the deal, sign up, and try two weeks free on us.
