Mark Farnsworth is currently reviewing selected films from the London Film Festival.
Ever wished you’d never picked up the phone? Just let it ring off and go back to bed none the wiser and let the world turn without you for a few hours more? So does Michael Brown, a low-tech luddite suffering from an acute bout of future shock. His apartment looks like a 70s interior from “The Rockford Files” as he answers an unexpected call from his junkie brother Tobey.
Tobey needs a driver and Michael just can’t say no, even though it means ditching his own birthday plans along the way. Michael’s wheels are a shabby 1975 Beamer rocking an old tape deck jammed full of Leonard Cohen, Wilco, Camper Van Beethoven and Superchunk. Tobey riding shotgun drolly observes that a “Car is sort of an extension of your personality.”
He’s right. It’s also an extension of the film itself. Before the shiny days of downloading a play list onto your iPod you had to invest time and effort in compiling a mix tape. Every track had to be listened to in full, every lyric committed to memory, every pause promising another gem, just as “Passenger Side’s” smartly pressed dialogue seeks our knowing approval.
Michael and Tobey cruise around the industrial armpit of L.A., searching for drugs or maybe something else completely. Signs for second rate eating establishments come and go; Burrito King, Pioneer Take Out, and Ms Donuts, as unappetising as moving to this crummy version of The City Of Angels. Each episode plays like a mellow version of a David Lynch movie with the acid frenzy of his characters replaced by the opiate drawl of Matt Bissonnette.
At one point they even describe the ultimate Lynchian nightmare as they try to make their own narrative more arresting to one another, “Sci-Fi incest with a twist of existentialism.” Michael’s subsequent explanation of existentialism to his brother is a high point in a script bristling with lines like, “Black and white T.V. is for cowards.”
“Passenger Side” is brim full of wit, a feature length riff on The Flat Eric Levi’s ad with shades of “Repo Man” thrown in for good measure. The two leads deliver intelligent, funny, and affecting performances, tenderly painted by Jonathon Cliff’s refined cinematography and aided by a surprising final turn of events. Michael’s last “Solaris”-like drive is sheer poetry that makes the audience wonder if he now wished he had a mobile phone with caller I.D.