When Carman invited me to write reviews for this blog, I knew that my first review had to be for a truly phenomenal movie. And so, I saw the White Ribbon. And then, I saw A Prophet. And then, I saw After Last Season, and I knew that I had found my first review.There is a reason that W. Carlson, Amazon Customer Reviewer, said "After Last Season may be the best movie ever made." I'm just not quite sure what it is.
Mark Region's After Last Season is the filmic equivalent of the awkward conversations so pressed for material that you begin to make sounds, hoping that these sounds will come together as words, that the words might form a sentence, and that this sentence might be remotely interesting. Usually, they are not. Usually, they trail off until you close the statement with some arbitrary "yeah, so..." And this is exactly how After Last Season finds its end. This being said, the adventure that takes place in this unguided piece of cinematic glory was well worth free admission and seven free beers I put myself through during the secret "non-screening" of the film I participated in last night. Supposedly, the film is not allowed any screenings, previous theatres had to destroy their copies, and the special effects on the film cost five million dollars. This is a context that really needs to be considered while watching this film. Five million dollars.
Essentially plotless, After Last Season contains a handful of unremarkable characters struggling towards some sort of narrative structure, but never quite getting there. A few half-developed murders are carried out by a Henry-Rollins-looking killer that is eventually stopped by a chair-throwing phantom during a psychological experiment involving chicklet-like microchips. Most of the film's screen time, however, is devoted to shots of furniture, exteriors of a paper-covered house, and arbitrary conversations between characters that only appear once. One gathers that these characters are medical students, that they are ambiguously located between "the city" and its suburbs, and that an FBI agent has early-onset Parkinson's. These details require a high level of attentiveness - and possibly repeat viewings - to catch. And it does not stop - unnecessary characters and arbitrary conversations are consistently introduced until the last frame. Region more or less gives a big "fuck you" to plot consistencies and any passable narrative.
The film exists in that space between conscious and unconscious, where silences last too long, images of essentially nothing are arbitrarily cut into nearly plotless scenes, and intentions are unclear - if there at all. After surviving all 93 minutes of After Last Season (we actually shook hands with strangers and congratulated eachother on not being one of the weak few that left early), I cannot confidently say anything about its intentions. Is it a joke? I really don't think so. Is it (intentionally) high art? I really don't think so. I cannot say why, but I do know that it is a masterpiece. All of its half-cocked twists and turns, trailing, monotonous dialogue, and slow-death floating images create a beautifully surreal, nauseating, skull-crushing, confusing, angering, sleepy cocktail of a film. After Last Season is horrible, but reaches a knee-cap breaking level of extraordinary. And so, Amazon Customer Reviewer W. Carlson, I'm going to have to agree with you on this one.
