Three films by Dan Sallitt

I hope I’ll be indulged if I hew to a journ­al­ist­ic con­ven­tion that, for reas­ons that remain obscure to me, has fallen into dis­fa­vor in recent years, and begin by mak­ing a dis­clos­ure. The writer and film­maker Dan Sallitt and I are friendly acquaint­ances. We run in a couple of the same social circles and hence see each oth­er at parties as well as at some screen­ings. We have “done” karaōke togeth­er, once. 

That said, we’re not “close.” There’s quite a bit I don’t know about him. Until recently, for instance, I was unaware that he’s also a musi­cian, and plays in a band, which inform­a­tion I found mod­er­ately irrit­at­ing, as I had been hop­ing to “corner” the “mar­ket” in film-critic-types-who-also-have-bands. While I admire Sallitt’s writ­ing on film, we dif­fer in taste more than a bit, and I frankly find myself exas­per­ated by cer­tain of his crit­ic­al enthusiasms. 

Sallitt has made three fea­ture films since the late ’90s; his latest, The Unspeakable Act, plays in New York as part of BAM’s CinemaFest on Sunday, June 24. I think it’s an abso­lutely remark­able film, one of the best of the year so far, and if you’re around, you should def­in­itely see it. I’m hop­ing it gets wider dis­tri­bu­tion, because, not to be crass or any­thing, I think it more than estab­lishes Dan’s bon­afides in terms of desev­ing a wider audi­ence, fund­ing for more films, and all that sort of thing. If you’re already famil­i­ar with Dan’s films, or even if you aren’t, this lengthy “con­ver­sa­tion” at MUBI is worth read­ing; and below are some of my obser­va­tions on Dan’s work so far. 

Made in 1998, Sallitt’s first fea­ture, Honeymoon, is clearly the work of a real film artist, albeit one who is test­ing his fully-formed voice against his tech­nic­al facil­ity. Let me talk about its strengths first. The movie tells an unusu­al New York story; Michael and Mimi (Dylan McCormack and Edith Meeks, seen above) long­time friends who toil in mid-level pos­i­tions in pub­lish­ing, are best friends who impuls­ively decide to marry without, not to be crude or any­thing, hav­ing estab­lished wheth­er they can get it up for each oth­er. One of Sallitt’s imme­di­ately vis­ible strengths as a writer and dir­ect­or of act­ors is his abil­ity to com­pre­hens­ively por­tray an actu­al social type (one that was more plen­ti­ful in 1998 New York than it is in 2012, admit­tedly): what I used to refer to as the Too-Brilliant-Copy-Editor, e.g., the genu­inely gif­ted and genu­inely sens­it­ive and aes­thet­ic­ally attuned soul that nev­er breaks through what you might want to call a glass ceil­ing for reas­ons that are entirely their own and are not unre­lated to a cer­tain social awk­ward­ness. This social sect is the only one, I believe that could con­tain non-religiously com­mit­ted indi­vidu­als who would marry without even get­ting a sense of what their sex life could be.

The res­ult­ant spec­tacle of two pain­fully smart people tor­ment­ing them­selves and each oth­er in the most civ­il­ized way pos­sible has its far­cic­al aspects, nat­ur­ally, but Sallitt does­n’t cari­ca­ture his char­ac­ters, and many of the scenes oper­ate on a low-frequency but def­in­itely palp­able level of emo­tion­al pain and phys­ic­al mor­ti­fic­a­tion that’s incred­ibly absorb­ing even while largely cringe-inducing. There’s a knife-edge on which the per­form­ances teeter between nat­ur­al­ist­ic and weirdly clumsy, and at times this actu­ally messes with the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief you might need to fully invest in the action. That said, the two leads are remark­able, par­tic­u­larly Meeks, a woman who’s not neces­sar­ily con­ven­tion­ally attract­ive and yet is able to exude, in per­form­ance, a demand­ing, even quer­ulous sexu­al­ity that’s seem­ingly at odds with her intel­lect and politesse and pre­ferred mode of living. 

Sallitt’s shoot­ing and edit­ing style here is surface-plain but, as with one of his cine­mat­ic her­oes Eric Rohmer, decept­ively canny, but total con­trol occa­sion­ally eludes him; now and again in a shot you get the feel­ing of the per­formers hav­ing a too-acute aware­ness of the cam­era, hold­ing them­selves back so as not to get too close to it, and so on. None of this finally com­prom­ises the film’s cumu­lat­ive power, which it accrues by con­tinu­ously threat­en­ing to send one of its char­ac­ters into a Pialat-style rage blo­wout but…well, I don’t want to spoil it for you. You can acquire the movie for view­ing in vari­ous formats/platforms at Dan’s home page. 

Dan’s second film, All The Ships At Sea, made in 2004, dis­plays more dir­ect­ori­al assur­ance from its very first, still shot. It also dis­plays Sallitt’s admir­able powers of com­pres­sion per­haps to a fault, as 64 minutes is a pretty unusu­al length for a fea­ture film. This is a fully-realized work though, once again fea­tur­ing the extraordin­ary Meeks in a lead role. She plays a woman recently escaped, or expelled, from a reli­gious cult, and the attempt of her Catholic theo­lo­gian sis­ter (Strawn Bovee, in the still above), to recon­nect with her, and help her put her life back together. 

In a sense this pic­ture harks back to Rohmer’s 1969 My Night At Maud’s, a feature-length chat about reli­gious philo­sophy dis­guised as a sex com­edy. Although Ships has neither the sex nor (for the most part) the com­edy (there is a fair amount of mord­ant humor, as when a char­ac­ter you don’t expect this kind of lan­guage from says “Ohio, Iowa, what the fuck­’s the dif­fer­ence?”). “We believe that a lot of the spir­itu­al tur­moil in the world is hap­pen­ing for a reas­on,” Meeks’ Virginia tries to explain to her sis­ter Evelyn. Eventually we come to under­stand that at issue here is not belief or dif­fer­ence of belief or lack there­of of any of the above but plain and hor­rif­ic dis­con­nec­tion, exem­pli­fied in the simple-as-death con­fid­ence Virginia con­fides to Evelyn about a child­hood tree­house: “No one knew about it. I built it myself.” Nevertheless, Sallitt gets a lot of implied spooki­ness out of the shad­ow of the cult that hov­ers over Virginia. I believe it is a testi­mony to Dan’s equan­im­ity as a per­son that he has not even con­sidered, as far as I know, tak­ing a polo mal­let to the knee­caps of the makers of Martha Marcy May Marlene.

 Still cour­tesy of BAMcinemaFest/Static Prods.

The Unspeakable Act is a fully realized—sure, I’ll say it—masterwork, an emo­tion­ally wrench­ing char­ac­ter study that puts its uncom­fort­able truths for­ward without recourse to con­ven­tion­al psy­cho­logy. That is, the power­ful attrac­tion super-precocious teen Jackie (Tallie Medel) feels for her older broth­er, the equally bril­liant but pos­sibly more well-adjusted and socially accom­plished Matthew, does­n’t “make sense,” yet makes total sense in the con­text Sallitt cre­ates for it. And once again, that con­text has its roots in an actu­al (or is it “prob­ably actu­al”?) social milieu, the shabby-genteel bohemi­an Brooklyn that’s been priced out of the Heights and whose dia­spora, such as it is, extends to the likes of Ditmas Park, where the film was shot. 

Using a vari­ety of dis­lo­ca­tion tech­niques (some of which are dis­cussed at length in Sallitt’s talk with Keller), the movie brings us uncom­fort­ably into Jackie’s world, and her bed­rock obses­sion, to the point that, fif­teen minutes in, when Jackie admits “I’ve nev­er slept with any­one,” the sigh of relief from the view­er is apt to be seis­mic­ally palp­able. Once what’s at stake is laid on the table, Sallitt deploys his char­ac­ters in what I can only describe as alchem­ic­al chess moves. Particularly upside-the-head-smacking is how we’re shown the way that the ami­able and ostens­ibly sane Matthew actu­ally gets off on the atten­tions of Jackie. When a ther­ap­ist enters the pic­ture (she is played, beau­ti­fully, by Caroline Luft, who, I should dis­close, is a friend of myself and my wife’s, albeit one we don’t see as often as we would like; in fact, I did not recog­nize her on my first view­ing of the film), that char­ac­ter gets to play not-quite-irresistable force to Jackie’s seem­ingly immov­able object. Rarely does cinema treat us to the spec­tacle of a per­son inflict­ing what can only be called meta­phys­ic­al dam­age to him or her self (des­pite its top­ic, the last thing Sallitt is mak­ing here is a “social prob­lem” pic­ture). One of the won­ders of Tallie Medel’s per­form­ance, besides the way she uses her slightly-sexually-ambiguous phys­ic­al­ity, is how she doc­u­ments that dam­age as vividly as if she were actu­ally phys­ic­ally cut­ting into her­self, even as Jackie the char­ac­ter believes she’s giv­ing noth­ing away that she does­n’t want to. 

The movie is ded­ic­ated to Rohmer, but it is entirely a Dan Sallitt work. I hope his next film comes soon­er than six to eight years from now.