Reykjavík Grapevine - 08.04.2016, Page 42

Written In The Stars
‘O, Brazen Age’ at Bíó Paradís
“Letting nostalgia wash over me—I
find this extremely satisfying and
also heartbreaking at the same time,”
says Canadian writer-director Alex-
ander Carson, whose first feature, ´O,
Brazen Age', plays at Bíó Paradís this
weekend.
In the film, a constellation of char-
acters orbit one another, old friends
in Toronto grappling with the exis-
tential sadness of young adulthood.
(Asked why her eye makeup is run-
ning, one explains: “My twenties.”)
Some are artists or actors, some are
in advertising or homemaking, all are
pretty and melancholy; “Lost Refer-
ence,” the title of a gallery show they
attend, seems equally applicable to
all. Some road-trip to take photo-
graphs of the diners and graveyards
of rural Western Quebec, seeking the
spiritual in the everyday; others tell
about their dreams.
The stars, by which we might
navigate, are a motif in the film, with
astrology and astronomy referenced
throughout. Constellations, says Car-
son, are “a metaphor for any kind of
narrative construction or any meth-
od of creating meaning—you look at
something in the sky that has no nat-
ural sense to you, and then you draw
these links, make these connections.”
´O, Brazen Age´ is “about that search
for meaning […] whether it’s looking
for faith, or burying yourself in the
past,” he continues, pondering the
“Eden before the Fall that these char-
acters associate with childhood and
with the 20th century.” Determined-
ly poetic original dialogue (“And so
I am employed. Let us drink,” is the
way one dodges a question about his
career choices) mingles with passag-
es from King Lear to imply a mythic
scope to their inquiries.
The film has an Icelandic connec-
tion through Atli Bollason, a local ac-
tor, producer, artist, DJ and even oc-
casional Grapevine contributor. Atli
was a friend of Carson’s at univer-
sity, and appears in the film as a sort
of rogue planet; his character (also
Atli) is infamous for never brushing
his teeth, shows up at an art opening
wearing a set of angel wings, and is
notably free of the longstanding inti-
mate entanglements that entrap his
friends, for better and for worse.
Carson is close with many of the
cast: one was sitting just offscreen
when he and I talked on Skype; an-
other is his brother. He prefers an
open-ended process, though a finite
budget and timespan demanded con-
cessions—much of the film was shot
in October 2014, with the cast flying
in from all over North America, as
well as Iceland, and they stuck very
close to the script. But that script was
put together the course of several
years, over table readings in which
Carson and collaborators would sit
down to read and think through a
new draft of the script, as well as
work through a few beers; the con-
versation continued through several
rough cuts of the film. Carson’s non-
hierarchical outlook echoes what he
calls the finished film’s “meandering,
pageant-like structure,” with its em-
phasis on discrete chapters, montage
(with two songs by Dan Bejar) and
digressions—itself a kind of constel-
lation.
The film’s look, a heterogeneous
mix of image sources and aesthet-
ics, constitutes a few stars in that
constellation. By switching between
professional- and consumer-grade
digital video, Super 16mm, and still
photographs, the film references the
textures of different eras, as the char-
acters themselves seek out star maps
for the new terrain of their lives.
Contemporary digital technologies
feel distant in comparison to previ-
ous generations’ images and objects,
tactile archives of bygone moments,
says Carson: “I don’t know if it’s
healthy to have these attachments to
souvenirs,” but it’s compelling, this
“way of making these weird some-
how meaningful but also complicat-
ed and perhaps completely contrived
connection with an idea about the
past.”
The film’s characters are grasp-
ing for these connections as well, for
better and for worse: “They’re stuck
in a pre-digital worldview,” Carson
explains, with their land-line tele-
phones, answering machines, and
Calvin Klein clothes. “They have this
romantic association with analog
technologies, that represents what
they feel like they’re missing in the
world they discovered as adults. The
characters very much associate the
90s with the world they were prom-
ised as children, before they had to
reckon with adulthood, 9/11, this
awakening that happened, at least
for me, around that time—when I left
my hometown, discovered that the
world was different.”
For Carson, all of this—childhood
memories, the grand narratives of
Western literature and film, mate-
rial objects—are both “beautiful and
tragic,” ways of “making your present
world resemble some sort of fairytale
version you have of the world that
does not really exist.” The morose,
starry-eyed characters of ´O, Brazen
Age´ palpably ache with a yearning
for a kind of wholeness that remains
elusive. So it’s over to us in the audi-
ence: “I’m interested,” Carson says,
“in challenging the audience to par-
ticipate in the construction of their
own narrative experience.”
SHARE: gpv.is/brazen
By MARK ASCH
20Movies Film Interview
NORDIC HOUSE PRE
SENTS
NORDIC
FILM
FESTIVAL
13–20 APRIL 2016
FREE ENTRANCE
The Fencer (FIN)
Facebookistan (DK)
Flocking (SE)
At Home in the World (DK)
Bikes vs Cars (SE)
Louder than bombs* (NO/DK/FR)
Becoming Zlatan (SE)
The Idealist (DK)
Absolution (FIN)
The Wave (NO)
Mikrofilm (NO)
Program www.nordichouse.is
Reservation www.tix.is
English subtitles
Reykjavík
* At Bíó Paradís 1400 ISK
42The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 4 — 2016