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To start off my week at Love & Anarchy, I had the privilege of seeing Magic Farm, an opener to the festival, screening second only to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. The movie was a campy, glittery mess— by design.
Magic Farm, written, directed by, and starring the Argentine-Spanish filmmaker Amalia Ulman, has been highly anticipated after its Sundance premiere as a downtown Manhattan-borne indie film. It has a stacked cast: the totally amazing, endlessly cool Chloë Sevigny; a sexy phoenix-risen-from-the-ashes Simon Rex; and the notorious Nickelodeon child star turned unlikely emotionally mature adult Alex Wolff. The cast included some other great actors I hadn’t heard of before but will definitely be looking into after watching (Camila Del Campo… I’d listen to your podcast if you know what I mean). It’s also got the MUBI-distributed stamp of approval and can be seen now on the increasingly popular indie streaming platform.
Magic Farm brings audience members into a very colorful Argentina, with frames that look like an aesthetically minded teenage girl’s dream canvas: wide brushes of pink and purple, neon greens and poppy reds. Argentina is much to thank for this pleasing palette, and Ulman does a great job utilizing her location. Chloë Sevigny plays Edna, the ringleader and rightful queen-bee of a disorderly American media crew making Instagram mini-docs about “crazy subcultures all around the world.” Sevigny was a true highlight, and I missed her whenever she was off-screen. She and her co-director/husband, Dave (Simon Rex) take the rag-tag group to South America for a shoot. Their loosely planned script quickly goes awry due to Jeff (Alex Wolff), an objectively inadequate production crew member with arrested development and mommy issues. As Dave abandons the squad to deal with a very American scandal back home, the rest of the story follows the team's valiant and somewhat useless effort of inventing an Argentinian tradition for their mini-doc.
Ironically, along the way the crew members engage with many real subcultures of Argentina, from hopeful skateboarding youth, to a lively stray-animal scene, and – if that's not enough – a legitimate environmental crisis. Yet, these stupid Americans can’t open their eyes to anything authentic, and are instead dead-set on inventing something from thin air that seems more suited for getting clicks from the Instagram algorithm. Luckily for myself, as I am presently exhausted by real-life current events, the film does not go too heavy handed with politics. All roads to social commentary are pretty quickly diverted by something else. The whole world basically ceased to matter while watching Manchi (Camila del Campo) move with ease around the screen with her killer face card and divinely styled outfits (big props to Emily Costanino).
In terms of cinematography, Eugene Kotlyarenko’s internet-age aesthetic is recognizable. Their creative partnership clicked when the credits rolled and I saw Eugene as one of three producers. It's unlikely that you would see an elderly woman motorcyclist with one of those 360 GoPros that shrink the whole world into a floating ball (re: The Code), or a normal sequence broken by horizontal iPhone footage of a dog taking a caca, in many other films. The camera also liked to whip its head rapidly from one symmetrically positioned set to another in a spur of narrative randomness. I’m tentatively calling this style: the Latina bedroom pop’s Wes Anderson high on Eugene drugs, topped off with a hefty helping of Gen-Z humor. Simon Rex complains in gringo Spanish about not being able to “dormir” without a charger for his vape. Unexpected or unethical shit happens that would maybe give other generations pause, but we charge on. Your baby-daddy is married? Eh, whatever. You’re sobbing into the hairy shoulder of a large closeted Argentinian motel owner? Honk honk, we gotta make it to the airport.
Some disjointed closing thoughts:
- The sound team did a great job and had me thinking there was actually an airplane flying by my seat.
- Joe Apollonio, who played Justin, could probably pull of a great Andy Warhol halloween costume, and Amalia Ulman would be great as Violet in a live action of The Incredibles.
- Thematically, one could call this a 21st century ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!
- The horse shlong was traumatizing...
All in all, I had fun with the film, and I enjoyed hearing the very loud Finnish lady behind me cracking up. In every theatre you always hope that there’s at least one of her kind somewhere in the audience.
