absurdist road movie about trying to escape politics

The road movie “Tender East” about the adventures of a girl from the American outback who finds herself in a whirlpool of surreal events is being released. The directorial debut of Sean Price Williams, cinematographer of Abel Ferrara, Alex Ross Perry and the Safdie brothers, is the story of Carroll’s Alice, who finds herself in a world of political ideas and sees nothing but absurdity in any of them.

Text: Pavel Pugachev

Gloomy girl Lillian (Talia Ryder) and a group of noisy friends come to Washington on an excursion. They are from conservative South Carolina, but the sexually mature girls and boys who have broken free are somehow not interested in the sights of the American capital, whether it is alcoholic libations and other entertainment events. You don’t have to look far for adventure: the very first karaoke bar the girl enters is barged in by far-right activists, looking for a lair of pedophiles. Lillian quickly escapes with her new capital friends through the fire exit leading to the tunnel. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began in much the same way.

Soon Lillian will become bored with the new company – the hipsters dressed as punks turn out to be antifa activists who are going to disperse a secret meeting of neo-Nazis somewhere in the woods. But this plan also misfires, and now the girl, who has already strayed from the company, finds herself at that very meeting of adherents of the racial cleansing of America and meets a pretty teacher who is ready to shelter a stranger. Of course, this is not the last stop: there will be filming in independent films, a forest rave with Islamists, and even a monastery. Unlike Lillian, who sooner or later finds herself bored everywhere, the viewer of “The Tender East” simply has no time to take a breath: this is a very dynamic, regularly knocking down and funny movie.

So funny that American critics, who generally received the film favorably, were somewhat embarrassed. Well, how can you laugh out loud when your neighbors in the cinema might look askance? Both the left and the right, both Republicans and Democrats, get it here, almost like in “South Park,” but the bearers of ideologies themselves are shown as living people. What is the secret value of a literature teacher who attends neo-Nazi meetings and quite reasonably criticizes the “liberal agenda” and the snobbery of European intellectuals towards the USA? and even played by the most charming Simon Rex, the star of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket.

Just as deftly as the main character escapes from her pursuers, the film maneuvers between ideologies, between new cinematic trends and the spirit of the “good old” American indie. Shot on 16mm film, Tender Orient feels less like a pastiche and more like a film sitting on the shelf from the mid-nineties. Here, as in the video collection of a dedicated film fan, there is a place for everything: music and animation inserts, amateur video recordings, fragments of your favorite movie. And although smartphones flash in the frame, and the characters joke about the storming of the Capitol, “Tender East” wants to be placed next to the cassettes of “Generation of Doom” by Gregg Araki, “Kids” by Larry Clark, “Gummo” by Harmony Korine and “Slacker” by Richard Linklater . And at first it may seem that in his directorial debut, excellent cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who has worked with Alex Ross Perry, Abel Ferrara, Michael Almereyda and the Safdie brothers, is simply saluting his older comrades in the indie camp. But, first of all, this is not entirely true: the independent cinema of the 1990s was least concerned with politics, while Williams is primarily concerned with it and how even those who are completely uninterested in it fall into its clutches. Secondly, they send air kisses here and to much more distant lands. Which is not surprising, given that the script was written by film critic Nick Pinkerton, who is currently working on a monograph on Jean Eustache.

The venerable film critic Richard Brody, in his review for The New Yorker, noted that the main character is called Lillian for a reason, like Lillian Gish, the great star of American silent films and the films of David Wark Griffith, to whom “Tender East” sends several greetings at once: here and from time to time pop-up intertitles directly referencing the films of the Biograph studio, which Simon Rex’s character shows Lillian and laments that she is bored. Moreover, the title can also be interpreted as a reference to Griffith’s “Way Down East” (in the Soviet box office this “tragedy in eight parts” was released as “Waterfall of Life”), and the typical artist Talia Ryder really does slightly resemble the young Gish. But, of course, she is not an orphan of the storm, not an eternal victim, and certainly not a saint.

The comparison with Carroll’s Alice not only suggests itself, but rushes at the viewer, but the Russian viewer will probably think about another fairy-tale character familiar from infancy – Kolobok. As in the story of the journey of the baked goods, everyone wants something from Lillian, but, apart from situational benefits, she does not need anything from those around her. She is not educated, but she is smart, resourceful and cunning, she immediately remembers everything she hears and easily escapes from the most hopeless situations. But, as in the case of Kolobok, no one can say what she really wants.

Or maybe you don’t need to want anything? Unlike ideologies, devout adherence to which turns one into a fanatic, “The Tender East” gives a person a chance. Contrasting one with another does not lead to good, groups of convinced people fall apart precisely because of their convictions, and the most principled ones do not follow their own principles. Hopes are dead, but people are still alive. It sounds pessimistic, but this bright film in every sense shows that reasonable cynicism has a human and even quite pleasant face. In the end, in order to stay in place, you need to run as fast as you can.

In theaters from March 21

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