Josh and Benny Safdie have been the center of a collective
of talented young filmmakers based here in New York, and their own highly
variegated work has been a prominent part of the output. They dabbled in
documentary most recently, but their last fiction feature, Daddy Longlegs, was memorably intense, working its way from a
light-hearted family saga to something much darker and troubling. Needless to
say, they should be on the radar of anyone interested in contemporary film. And
with their new film Heaven Knows What
they have made a great leap forward.
Heaven Knows What
is a harrowing trip through a brief period in the life of a homeless junkie,
played with astonishing nuance by writer Arielle Holmes. Holmes is not an
actress, but the film is based on her memoir and she clearly has achieved the
necessary distance to remember and recreate the hellish life she has left
behind. Not, perhaps, recalled in tranquility, but certainly recalled in vivid
detail.
More than one way to get clean: Arielle Holmes in Heaven Knows What
Harley (Holmes) is madly, damningly in love with Ilya (Caleb
Landry Jones), a fellow addict who is only interested in his next fix. When she
offers to commit suicide to prove her love, he encourages her to make good on
the threat. She survives and is soon back on the streets, hanging with a motley
gang of drug fiends, drunks and losers, led by dealer-user Mike (Buddy Duress,
apparently a legendary street character himself). Then it’s the agonizingly
repetitive life of getting high, searching for the next fix, getting high again
and on and on.
The Safdies make this material profoundly compelling. Using
a visual style that echoes the quasi-neo-realist drug movies of the early ‘70s
(think Panic in Needle Park but with
even less gloss), but without recourse to hand-held camera, relying instead on
long lenses and static set-ups that give the film a distanced, occasionally
hallucinatory look, they find a striking balance that eschews both voyeurism
and preaching. There are a few moments of dark humor, as in the scene in which
an oddly supportive Hasid offers Harley money so that she can stay high; she
replies quizzically, “I’m not Jewish or anything.”
But mostly this is a bleak world in which a recurring scene
of Harley and Ilya embracing in extreme close-up is so ambiguous that one
cannot tell whether they are making love or trying to strangle one another.
Such is the chilling reality that the film captures so adroitly.
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