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dvd
review:
Hysteria
Director: Antero Alli
Studio: Vertical Pool
reviewed
by Jesse Walker
March
11 , 2004
| For over a decade, Antero Alli has been writing and directing
deeply personal movies on a shoestring and screening them up and
down the West Coast. He's usually unwilling to release his efforts
on video or DVD, on the grounds that his art is best realized on
a big screen and in a theater, among "a group of virtual strangers
gathering in a dark and cavernous space to witness visions through
a big window into another time, another place."
Hysteria is an exception. First publicly projected in 2002,
the movie was released on DVD in February 2004. "It seems to work
on the small screen," Alli explains, "maybe better than the large
screen." Furthermore, "I'm acting on a moral impulse to get this
vision out there now." Hold that thought.
Hysteria opens with an hallucinatory sequence in Croatia
in 1991, then jumps to Oakland, California, ten years later. A boxer
named Ikar (Jakob Bokulich, who wrote the film with Alli) is haunted
by two apparent encounters with the Virgin Mary, once as a boy and
once as a soldier in the Balkan wars. He moves next door to two
Iranian-American sisters, Marion (Atosa Babaoff) and Peri (Anastasia
Vega). Peri left New York shortly after September 11; she is self-absorbed,
estranged from her parents, and attracted to her Croatian neighbor.
The ghost of 9/11 haunts the movie, though not in the way audiences
might initially expect. One of the first things Peri says onscreen
is that "the war makes me horny"; a few seconds later, she declares
that the attacks turned New York into "the world's biggest fuckfest."
It's an effective introduction to her hedonistic character and it
helps establish when the story is taking place, but viewers might
be forgiven for assuming that it's simply a background detail. Gradually,
though, it becomes clear that terror has a more intimate foothold
in these three people's lives. This terrorism is not Islamic and
is not tied to an organized conspiracy; what it has in common with
the September 11 attacks is its roots in fundamentalist certainty.
Alli has created a visually engaging movie, a work that treats
digital video's distinctive look as a tool rather than a limitation.
Ikar's encounters with the Virgin Mary have the spooky, charged
quality of a Day of the Dead diorama or a mad roadside painter's
apocalyptic visions. The sequences set in the more mundane world
have the immediacy of a home movie. Chris Odell's editing adds a
certain sense of isolation by putting small spaces between the lines
each character speaks; it's as though we're watching one person
assimilate (or not assimilate) what the other has said before enunciating
a line of her own. The haunting score, some of it composed and most
of it performed by the director's wife Sylvi Alli, feels ancient
and modern at the same time.
Hysteria is by no means a perfect effort. There are small
glitches here and there: a moment out of focus, a short lapse in
the sound quality. More vexing is another aftereffect of 9/11: It's
too polemical, too willing to preach to us directly when the climax
comes rather than simply let its ideas emerge from the events. This
is related, I suspect, to Alli's mission "to get this vision out
there now."
Which is a shame, because it's a vision that's otherwise quite
compelling. Ikar reenacts the myth of Icarus by flying, figuratively
speaking, too close to the sun. But Hysteria does not resolve
itself the same way as its classical predecessor, and it leaves
us with the possibility of forgiveness and a distinctly heretical
sort of salvation. The story is, at root, a meditation on two lines
from the film, the first spoken by Ikar and the second by the equally
well-named Marion: "Everyone wants to believe that they have some
special purpose on earth" and "If you want anything resembling the
truth, especially these days, you need about a half a dozen sources
just to sort it out." The first thought proves more cynical, and
the second more philosophical, than they initially sound.
bio:
Jesse
Walker is managing editor of Reason and author of Rebels
on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU
Press).
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