THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

Gothic Odyssey

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
Starring Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch, Kerry Condon, Harry Dean Stanton, David Byrne

Italian auteur Paolo Sorrentino (the magisterial Il Divo) takes an incisive look at the American cultural landscape in his bizarre but endlessly fascinating entrance into English-language filmmaking.

The picaresque tale follows ageing goth rocker Cheyenne’s (Sean Penn) journey across the US in search of the Nazi camp guard who abused his father. Stirred from his retirement in Ireland alongside his fire fighter wife Jane (Coen brothers regular Frances McDormand) upon hearing of his estranged father’s imminent passing, he arrives in his hometown of New York too late to say his goodbyes. As luck would have it, though, veteran Nazi hunter Mordecai Midler (Judd Hirsch) is on hand to inform him of his old man’s lifelong longing for vengeance, and so Cheyenne sets of on a solo cross-country quest in search of...

Well, that is the question. Cheyenne is an enigmatic character who gives up his secrets and motivations slowly and unwillingly as the film follows its meandering course. With his look clearly patterned on Cure frontman Robert Smith - all bird’s nest black hair and smeared makeup - he’s certainly a striking figure, but he’s also an ineluctably sad one, with his soft, whistling voice and permanent hangdog expression. While his stated purpose for his journey is the pursuit of justice for his father, as time passes we are gradually led to the notion that he is in fact running away from something: the ennui of his sedentary retirement, the weight of his musical reputation, his life, himself.

It sounds heavy going, and Sorrentino’s propensity for static, albeit stunningly beautiful, shot compositions and glacial pacing sometimes doesn’t help matters, but the film is shot through with a wonderfully warm vein of absurdist humour, which is often evoked simply by placing Cheyenne in the varied milieu that is middle America; simply seeing him play ping pong in a roadside diner is a scene for the ages.

It’s also a profoundly affecting film, as Sorrentino repeatedly shows us the touching scenes of human connection and communication that punctuate Cheyenne’s trip: a singalong to the titular song with the young son of a dead soldier; a quiet conversation with an elderly luggage magnate (the legendary Harry Dean Stanton). It’s that combination of the dour, the profound, and the absurd that has alienated some pundits, as the film wilfully resists easy classification; like life, every time you think you’ve got it figured it throws up an extra complication.

But for all its internal contradictions and tonal variations, This Must Be The Place hangs together remarkably well. It’s an unusual film, to be sure, but by no means an unknowable one, working as a piece of outsider sociology, as a character study, and as a meditation on the inevitability of change and the cost of resisting it. Recommended.

_TRAVIS JOHNSON