South by Southwest 1

By Robert Koehler

Marty Jackitansky, a rather foul human being whom you can’t take your eyes off of in writer-director Joel Potrykus’ Buzzard—by many millions of miles the best movie yet screened at South by Southwest—is a feral, degenerated form of the classic grifter of the 1930s. He temps at a bank office, but can barely tolerate anyone around except fellow office staffer Derek (an amusing Potrykus) and finds innumerable ways to make petty cash by bilking people, or just by getting over, like grabbing equipment he’s ordered for the office and returning it to an electronics store for cash. Once he gets the terrible idea of signing over bank customers’ checks to his own name, Marty’s track is relentlessly downward, a course that traces from corporate America to homeless in Detroit until the final shot (worthy of a long post-screening discussion), a metaphysical transference of sorts. Potrykus casts his regular go-to “star,” Joshua Burge, from the first (the 2010 short Coyote) and second (the debut 2012 feature, Ape) pieces of his Animal trilogy, and by this point, the director and actor have developed a electrifying collaboration that recalls Lindsay Anderson (If… and O Lucky Man!) and Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange) allowing young Malcolm McDowell to let his id to run free. The connection is explicit: There’s a late sequence in Buzzard, an extended take of Burge’s bug-eyed Marty consuming a hotel room service plate of spaghetti, that deliberately quotes McDowell’s Clockwork spaghetti scene with Patrick McGee and the hospital finale. Buzzard is in fact a salad of cinephilia; the penultimate scene, an astonishing travelling shot following Marty running down a Detroit street, just as deliberately quotes from Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang. There’s not only the line from McDowell here; Burge can easily be viewed as Denis Lavant to Potrykus’ Carax, and more than in Ape, the expression of young male animality, stemming from unresolved anger and self-hatred, reaches the level of dance and unexpected ecstasy, perhaps even transcendence.