Butter on the Latch

This beautiful depiction of life, mental illness, survival, and modern day American sin boils down into a gorgeous and disturbing piece of poetry. This is not for the faint of heart. I loved it.

I don't doubt for a minute that Josephine Decker has talent but having recently watched two of the films she's directed I'm not quite sure if her talent is for making movies. "Madeline's Madeline" was certainly impressive but it still wasn't an easy film to sit through. It was more like the recording of a 'performance' than a proper film while her feature debut, "Butter on the Latch" is nothing more than a series of rambling conversations filmed in a documentary style that might once have been called 'cinema-veritie'.

There is a kind of a plot; it's like a thriller but one so cerebral all the thrills have been removed and since she never holds her camera steady for very long the film induces a kind of vertigo. What she is good at is getting totally naturalistic performances from her actresses, (she works mostly with women), but, after a while, with no real storyline, just watching them 'act' becomes simply boring. I have a feeling she might have a career in avant-garde theatre but for now, I am not quite convinced she's cut out for the cinema.

The film started off rocky for me, as the opening scene was so disjointed from what followed that for a time, I was wondering if that was actually a very quick short that preceded the film and had nothing to do with it. And in many ways, that scene doesn't seem to have anything to do with the rest of the film, making for the most peripheral and unrelated opening scene since Beast of Yucca Flats. That is always a concerning sort of movie to be reminiscent of.

The largest and most glaring problem, I found, was the cinematography. A frighteningly large amount of this film was shot out of focus, giving everything a very vague and undefined look. While this can certainly be used to good effect sometimes, when it feels like it's every other shot, or is for very long shots, it starts to lose its efficiency and just becomes somewhat disorienting and disengaging. It's also the sort of effect that I've seen more to highlight confusion, or intoxication, or being a daze... here it just seems to be done without a reason behind that choice that I could see. Some of the shots also just hold far too long.

The story itself was weakened by a combined set of frequently boring, sometimes repetitive, dialog and a plot that may count as only the vaguest of plots. The dialog between the main two characters has so many superfluous conversations that just repeat or don't go anywhere that it seems to really not excuse later in the film when their conversations seem to contain no useful information (either for the audience or for one another) while seemingly treated like actual conversations of substance. The plot, on the other hand, seems to be more like a series of scenes, without really what seems to be any rhyme or reason to how those scenes are put together. There's long chunks of film that carry the vibe that they are meant be symbolic, not of anything in particular, but just representative of what symbolic things would LOOK like. It's not exploring the mind, it's not setting the atmosphere, it's not foreshadowing or something, it's just things that are meant to look symbolic that seem to carry no actual meaning, and in some cases actually came off as humorous more than sensical.

When this ended, I was just in my seat for a few minutes trying to figure out how any of that was meant to fit together, as as the film goes on, it starts to make less and less sense, with multiple narrative jumps, wild swings in characterization that feel inconsistent, long scenes that don't seem to convey anything, and a very unusual choice of what scenes to feature. I really don't know what, if anything, I was actually meant to come away from this film with beyond a vague familiarity with the eastern European folk music that is a constant background throughout.

"In BUTTER, Sarah and Isolde's seeming chumminess is abruptly disrupted after Sarah shows initiative to get pally with Steph, whom Isolde ostensibly reckons as"not attractive". However, later Sarah discovers a closeness between Isolde and Steph that may suggest otherwise. After Steph politely declines her invitation for carnal pleasure, and falling out with Isolde, Sarah is so befogged that her viewpoint becomes increasingly untrustworthy, paranoia and hallucination creep in when a roll in the hay with Steph is finally effected. BUTTER is ultimately about the comedown of infatuation, the pitfalls of getting to know another human being, eventually, Sarah is too mentally distracted to enjoy the physical passion which she yearns for, Decker informs us how a woman's temperamental insecurity can cast a dark cloud on her sexual and emotional life."

-

This was more of a mood piece than a "film", in my view. Some of the dialogue is quite good, as is some of the cinematography... but then there's the frequent use of out-of-focus, and some discontinuities in the narrative.

I started by not being sure where the "plot" was taking us, but eventually gave up trying to really understand what was going on, who was who, and whether various scenes were real or imagined.

I didn't dislike it, as such, but certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Some nice music though.