UPSTREAM COLOR

Shane Carruth 

(USA)

“They could be starlets”. This is all I want to write about the characters in this film, because there is too much else and too little to give as takeaways, and because I want to spend more time with Carruth and Thoreau.  

"They could be starlets" is repeated as if a poem, finding a transcendent moment in an otherwise creepy story. 

A review by way of a riff:

"Upstream Color" is very much part of a shift to post-2012 in that it breaks into a sci-fi reality most have never considered. Does it have an ethos? Does it need one? Is it just an experiment?

Here are some points I took from this film:

We have the potential for soul mates.

Love is re-orientation.

Emotional/biological lives can entwine.

Hands can penetrate another reality.  

There is a wholistic reality and a skewed one.

Amy Seimentz is our Juliette Binoche, naked in her role throughout, as her character is drug-raped and then made to go through a series of training experiments, only to give away her money and identity as she knew it. As drugged Kris, she is also not unlike an Edie Sedgewick, gradually re-emerging as an empowered Kris. Carruth as the director/actor/everyman here works, but I am also conscious of him as the actor in the lead role. It makes it harder to get swept up in his character, but Seimentz’s Kris sweeps you up plenty.   

There may be wormholes under your skin.

Things naturally move upstream.

Human nature revisits itself.

Carruth says  he is interested in “personal narrative removes”  and what that does to the characters. The characters have to process their reality constantly.  

They are busy rehumanizing/re-integrating from their disorientation.

Carruth does it all, sound recording, mixing, re-mixing natural sound, recreations.

Walden is Carruth's device.  

Carruth’s use of Thoreau makes for coincidences.

As a director, Caruth says he was “tripping” on Walden.

The characters are tripping on Walden.

There is a blue to yellow revelation trajectory  

Production value/design is styled to match the currents and the sections of the film.

Carruth often chooses microscopic views that show us just what is in the frame via shallow depth of field, to exclude all else.  

There is a constant and consistent micro/macro level to the unfolding of the storyline, and this is one of the tropes that really works, along with the sight of the worm that makes its way under Kris's skin. 

I was quite moved by my own disorientation and queasiness, as if we all have to reset ourselves to move forward in the new multi-layered dimensions of our time on earth as we know it. It got beneath my skin.