Making a film about people who kill themselves may be considered commercial suicide, but for his first feature writer/director Goran Dikic has created a humorous love story/road movie that got a lot of positive feedback from both audiences and critics, when it toured the international festival circuit a year to eighteen months ago. Now it has finally got UK distribution and a limited theatrical release.
After taking his own life with razor blades across the wrists, lovelorn Zia (Patrick Fugit from ALMOST FAMOUS) finds himself in a bland, nowhere world inhabited by other suicides, working in a pizzeria called Kamikaze Pizza. Here he befriends a Russian rock star, Eugene, who killed himself by pouring beer into his electric guitar while on stage. Zia is having trouble adjusting to his new “life”, where no one smiles and the jukeboxes only play music by people who killed themselves, until he hears that the girl who drove him over the brink had also killed herself and was in the same netherworld. So he convinces Eugene to take his beat up car and go with him in search of his lost love. On the way they pick up a hitchhiker called Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon – RULES OF ATTRACTION, A KNIGHT’S TALE), who wants to talk to the “people in charge” because she believes she is there by mistake.
After several adventures they stumble across Kneller (Tom Waits) who runs a sort of refuge where good things happen. Here Zia discovers the whereabouts of his ex, who is with the self proclaimed Messiah King, played by Will Arnett (Gob from the excellent TV sit-com Arrested Development). When Zia finally catches up with his ex he realises that maybe it isn’t her he loves now.
Ultimately, this is an uplifting film about how love conquers all, without resorting to the saccharine sweetness that usually plagues most rom-coms. Not that this could really be classified as a typical rom-com. It does have lots of moments of gentle dark humour, like the black hole in Eugene’s car, but it is not a laugh-out-loud comedy, which seems rather fitting given the film’s conceit. Much of its sardonic humour comes from its concept of purgatory as a dirty, barren, washed-out, joyless world of menial jobs and bad food, which, sadly, is not that different from the world of drudgery millions of the living already inhabit: a view that is further enhanced by the film’s production design and muted colour palette. But it does have a happy ending.
This is an ideal film for confessed unromantics to take their more romantically inclined partners to see, without blowing their credibility.
WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY is on limited theatrical release from November 23.