Cold Weather
director: Aaron Katz
I'm only going to use this word once here, and only as a necessary corrective: Aaron Katz is not a "mumblecore" filmmaker. I'm not even sure that label means anything anymore, but evidently some secret law demands that it appear in every review of every indie movie made by anyone under 40, so there you go: compliance to the letter. Now get thee to the theater, because this movie is pretty sweet.
Katz, a Portland native currently living in Pittsburgh, has already made two gorgeous-looking, understated films, Quiet City and Dance Party USA, both well worth finding. His third feature, set in Portland, begins as a tender study of the relationship between a brother and sister, a welcome variation on the standard boy-girl dynamic. But it quickly morphs into some kind of slacker Foucault's Pendulum, all tense and paranoid (in its calm, still, Portlandish way) and plagued with red herrings. Then the red herrings turn out not to be, exactly, and the movie becomes a slow-motion play on The Big Sleep, with maybe a smidge of Breathless if you like. But the focus on the siblings' rapport never lets up, and it's this rather than the central caper that makes the story's resolution so satisfying.
The movie follows Doug (Cris Lankenau, who also starred in Quiet City), who's just left school before finishing his degree in forensic science, a topic he particularly does not want to discuss. He's moved in with his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn), who's more pulled-together and works in an office somewhere but doesn't seem to have much fun. Doug gets a job in an ice factory and makes friends with a co-worker, Carlos (Raul Castillo). When Doug's ex-girlfriend, Rachel (Robyn Rikoon), comes to visit from out of town, the four of them end up hanging out; none of them really seems to know anybody else in Portland. (When Doug tells his sister he's invited "the guys from work" over for poker, only Carlos shows up, and it's totally unsurprising.) When one night Rachel fails to turn up where she said she'd be, Carlos -- who's been reading a bunch of Doug's Sherlock Holmes novels -- suspects something is up. Doug figures he's overreacting, but the clues accumulate, and pretty soon they're deep in noirsville.
Throughout, Portland looks like an aging beauty being studied by an old lover; I've driven up that section of Glisan Street by the Rasmussen apartment complex (which incidentally is perfectly cast as home to the movie's skeezy, barely-glimpsed villain) at least a billion times and never once found it so attractive. Same goes for underneath the Morrison Bridge, and the traintracks along Southeast Brooklyn Street. Katz and cinematographer Andrew Reed make the city look the way it really looks, but more intensely; it's realized, not glamorized.
Katz will be at screenings tonight and Sunday at Cinema 21 for a post-film Q&A. The film shows at C21 all this week.