Events
Aug 26 - Aug 30: GNY: Cinema, Screening and conversation with Ronald Bronstein
Thursday, August 26, 2010
3:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Description:
Frownland
Ronald Bronstein,
2007 (35mm, 106 mins)
Shot on 16mm with a miniscule
budget over a span of two years, Ronald Bronstein’s arrestingly bleak Frownland
focuses on one Keith Sontag, a stuttering, balding outer-borough schlub
(played with uncomfortable veracity by Dore Mann) who scrapes together
a life hawking coupon packages door-to-door for a shady organization
claiming to be a multiple sclerosis charity. Chronically inarticulate,
constantly shifting his weight from side to side, Sontag is a sweating
mass of post-traumatic social ineptitude, repeatedly rejected by even
those few individuals closest to him, like his abusive hipster
roommate, Charles (Paul Grimstad), and his equally neurotic
acquaintance Laura (Mary Wall). Filmed with grimy myopia in a stained
palette of dark yellowish-browns,
Frownland
shuffles Sontag through his internal labyrinth of pain with a glowering anti-humanism on par with David Lynch’s
Eraserhead
or Daniel Clowes’s Eightball.
There is little redemption in Bronstein’s universe, save for the astonishing existence of
Frownland
itself, a brilliant character study whose unforgiving commitment to
this noisome emotional stew is nothing less than a miracle in an age
dominated by starry-eyed independent entertainments.
