Frownland: Down the Drain

Struggling to talk and fighting himself while doing so, Keith rubs his mouth, opens his mouth in the silent scream that recurs throughout the film. He tenses his neck muscles, grimaces and bounces, huffs and puffs, rocks back and forth as if davening, shuffles and shifts from foot to foot as if the floor were hot. Agitated and confused, he looks as if he’d rather be anywhere than where anyone can see him—and his terror at being in the presence of others (which he nonetheless craves so desperately) is embodied in Williams’s urgent, insistent, and roving camera work, which holds and follows Mann in extended close-ups; the actor seems as terrifyingly trapped in the frame of a camera looming close to his face as Keith is in people’s spotlight-judgmental gazes.

The insults and injuries that Keith endures are enough to make him scream—and to shrink him to invisible silence. It doesn’t help that Charles, when asked to live up to his bare-minimal responsibility as roommate, gives Keith a pearl-clutchingly punctilious runaround of faux outraged dignity before calling him a “burbling troll in his underwear,” a “diseased freak,” and a just plain “worthless piece of shit.” Keith’s calamitous existence is also a tale of body horror, with Laura jamming a pushpin into his arm, Keith holding his own eyelids open to the point of pain and tears, his spray of mucus and drivel, the blood that he sheds in a climactic assault on his dignity and his body alike that sends him hurtling through the city like a wounded animal whose all the more conspicuous vulnerability renders him all the more prone to a new round of torments and all the readier to lash out at his tormentors only to be tormented all the more.

Yet despite the movie’s wild rage, it is fine-grained with the discerning poignancy of tiny gestures—some of vast grace, others of untold anguish, sometimes both together, as when Keith offers Laura, in lieu of a mirror that she requests and he doesn’t have, a chrome spatula to gaze into. There’s also an element of cosmic comedy in Keith’s sufferings, in his Ralph Kramden–like round of failed schemes and missed chances, not to climb the ladder of success but merely to survive intact. If a schlemiel is the person who spills a bowl of soup and a schlimazel is the person it’s spilled on, what to make of Keith, who spills the soup on himself and can’t help making others want to pour it on him intentionally? Bronstein delights cringingly in the abject negotiations and ruses of Keith’s sales pitches, the demeaning negotiations with Carmine, Charles’s crazily complicated intellectual dialogue with another job seeker at a test-prep office, the anguished and reckless ploys with which Keith demands Sandy’s attention, and a grand scene with a therapist that sharply outlines one of the intimate terrors of Keith’s childhood—and does so with a cannily oppressive visual composition to match. (Frownland also offers, as ancillary details of an urban classic, two of the three greatest intercom scenes I know; the other is in Leos Carax’s first feature, Boy Meets Girl.)

Much of the action takes place at night, in extreme low-light conditions; the movie, filmed on 16 mm film and blown up to 35 for release, packs high-relief grain that gives the images a hard, rough, concretelike texture that matches the hectic energy, the pushy proximity, the looming intensity of Williams’s framings with a handheld camera. The images feel like sounds, and the soundtrack—in which the dialogue is copious and distinctive yet the silences bear a unique eloquence and terrifying power—conjures images. There’s another, virtual sound that reverberates throughout Frownland, and Bronstein creates it by means of his hands-on editing. In assembling the film, he allowed it no respite; there are no transitional or intermediate shots to suggest the passing of time, nothing that merely illustrates the practicalities of travel, rest, or nourishment; his scenes, his images, his rough-edged and rocklike chunks of time slam into one another with a violent, crashing energy that fractures and shatters the film’s nonetheless linear continuity.

One can only hope that the chaos of inhibition and vortex of pain that Bronstein draws from Mann are a supreme theatrical illusion, though in any case the lived authenticity of the film’s ravaged isolation comes off as the distillation of Bronstein’s own states of mind. One doesn’t have to know about the demanding conditions of its production to feel them in the results—the grim uncertainties of Bronstein’s exertions to raise money to pay for the movie himself, including six-day weeks of work as a projectionist to finance an occasional day of shooting, with a minimal crew working with bare necessities, over the course of several years, with completion in doubt and release unlikely (it was indeed ultimately self-distributed), with the terror that the visions and ideas trapped inside him might never get out, that the world at large was somewhere between indifferent to and mocking of his efforts. The movie’s own sense of solitude reflects its status as an independent film in a moment when, with only a few exceptions, the field was divided between conventional humanism and aspirational genre filmmaking for a shot at Sundance, which had become Hollywood’s minor league. 

The transformative subjectivity of Frownland’s apparent realism showed Bronstein’s own generation of filmmakers that it was no longer—that it had never been—enough merely to record, to depict, to dramatize. The ways of influence are often oblique; despite the isolation of its production, and despite its scant release, Bronstein’s film decisively and definitively raised the emotional temperature and the aesthetic stakes of the American independent cinema. Most practically and most directly, the film set the tone for Josh and Benny Safdie’s abraded and scathing urban realism. And, of course, Bronstein himself is at the center of that world: not only did his film inspire the Safdie brothers, he also infused Daddy Longlegs with his mercurial approach to performance by playing its lead role, and he cowrote and coedited their most recent films. The personal cinema of many of this era’s most accomplished and most daring independent filmmakers has been fueled by the inner and private furies unleashed in Frownland.