Are Sasquatches snorers? You know the answer, deep within. Yes, they do. Snoring, eating, and picking bugs from each other's fur are noisy. Sasquatches do what else? One of the craziest movies of the year—or century—suggests they weep, snuggle, bury their dead, hurl rocks in rivers, develop art, and wonder if they're alone.
However, brothers David and Nathan Zellner's 90-minute, narrator-less, wordless experiment “Sasquatch Sunset” is ambitious and irritating. It's unclear if everyone created or should watch it high. Nathan Zellner, Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Christophe Zajac-Denek play four Sasquatches who communicate exclusively in grunts, snorts, and howls in hair suits and prosthetics. They also pee lots.
It's unclear why the directors hired famous actors instead of unknowns. No Sasquatches do more than Method Chimpanzee—jumping, whooping, and snarling. Real chimps would chastise the quartet for overacting.
As an exercise in monster empathy, “Sasquatch Sunset” does well. When we see a loping Bigfoot in the middle distance and three more, we know they're telling this narrative, not the people who normally record them in shaky camera frames.
Many Sasquatches are like us, such when one brings flowers to lure another or two Bigfoots comfort each other after a loss. When they pound trees with sticks together, a rhythmic inquiry echoing through the valley, it's most moving. We're calling—anyone like us?
However, there's much grossness. Besides peeing, Sasquatches sneeze, procreate noisily, and touch their genitals and smell their fingers. Their poo can be thrown on cue to scare predators. One juvenile Bigfoot constructs a puppet and talks to it, like the youngster in “The Shining”; another considers inserting his manhood into a little tree hole, like a prehistoric riff on “American Pie.”
Bigfoot may be filthy and profound. But what are the filmmakers trying to convey—satire, allegory, pity, naturalism, or gross-out comedy? The Sasquatches are very human and may represent our innocent pasts, a missing link in our evolution, the unending violence of nature, or the voiceless among us. Filmmakers may adore the picture of throwing excrement.
Gorgeous panoramas of virgin forests and misty valleys don't help us figure out when this all happened, but gradually, clues emerge, including traces of logging and a bizarre scene at a human camping site scored by Erasure's “Love to Hate You.” The Zellners squandered any environmental lesson.
The Octopus Project plays fantastic music, from brilliant electric guitar noodles to sci-fi electronic dread reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Sasquatch Wrangler has one of the coolest cinematic credits ever. You rarely see that.
You don't see Sasquatch movies every day, so let this one pass. Bleecker Street's “Sasquatch Sunset,” which opens in some theaters on April 12 and expands April 19, is rated R for “for some sexual content, full nudity and bloody images.” Duration: 89 minutes. One star out of four.
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