Notable Festivals: Venice, SXSW
When I was 18, an old friend of my mother’s came to stay overnight at our house. This was no social visit— before this woman arrived, my father, brother and I urgently disposed of every bottle in the liquor cabinet. My mother’s friend was an alcoholic, and this particular night found her in the deepest grips of her addiction, cast out of her own home by a husband who had reached his breaking point. After we had all gone to bed, my brother and I woke up to muffled commotion in the other room and the voices of strangers. Paramedics. My mother’s friend, at some point, had been rummaging through the house and found a bottle of rubbing alcohol, inviting a series of violent seizures after proceeding to drink most of it.
This was my first brush with the terror of addiction, and I use the word “terror” quite deliberately. It’s a horrific disease, altering one’s brain chemistry to the point that risking death seems like an entirely reasonable factor in the pursuit of the next high. Imagine, needing alcohol so badly that you’d happily drink pure rubbing alcohol, or even mouthwash in a desperate attempt to extract some kind of buzz from the minuscule amount of alcohol contained therein. My mother’s friend managed to make it through that night okay, but from what I understand, she’s still struggling. As I’ve grown up and befriended others who have had their own struggles with alcohol, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of addiction, and the lifelong struggle to stay clean and sober.
Indeed, once the beast of addiction has its claws in you, it has you for life. Those who are determined to rid themselves of it are in a day-by-day battle of mindfulness and willpower. Those who aren’t, however, are locked into an altogether different battle that most of “civilized” society has very little comprehension of— or empathy for. Indeed, to engage with this latter group on any meaningful level requires tremendous reserves of empathy; the ability to see the lingering humanity within a husk of a body hollowed out by the cumulative damage of substance abuse. Directors Josh and Benny Safdie have built a career for themselves off the back of this unique empathy, readily venturing out into the shadowy, grimy fringes of New York City and extracting the nuggets of dramatic relatability within characters that we’d otherwise cross the street to avoid. The brothers’ 2014 feature, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT, is easily the most hardcore of these artistic pursuits: a raw and uncompromising look at a young woman’s harrowing life as a homeless heroin addict, as well as the illogical, desperate absurdities and cruel twists of fate that comprise her daily reality.
Jerry Schatzberg’s 1971 film THE PANIC AT NEEDLE PARK casts an undeniable shadow over the Safdies’ second feature together (Josh’s third), to the extent that HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT was filmed in many of the same locales. Unlike its predecessor, however, this story is not exactly a work of fiction. The film is based on “Mad Love in New York City”, an unpublished memoir written by lead actress Arielle Holmes and typed out piecemeal on display computers at Apple Stores throughout Manhattan. Holmes was encouraged to write the book by Josh himself, who “discovered” her one day in a subway station during a street-casting session in the Diamond District for a long-gestating project that would ultimately become UNCUT GEMS; initially assuming she was part of the diamond industry, he was surprised to learn that she was actually homeless and caught up in the throes of drug addiction, earning a meager keep as a dominatrix at a sex club named Pandora’s Box (2). Over a series of dinners, Josh would listen to Holmes’ wild stories and subsequently urge her to get her experiences down on paper. An intriguing throughline emerged — her tumultuous romantic relationship with a fellow homeless addict named Ilya — and the prospect of making a film centered on Holmes gradually became an urgent one… especially after a particularly bad episode with Ilya caused Holmes to attempt suicide (2).
Some might call this development approach exploitative; to adapt one’s pain into a unit of entertainment is to work within an ethical gray area where the integrity of the underlying motivation becomes absolutely critical to the final product’s success. A lesser filmmaker might appropriate the material as an act of self-aggrandizement, boosting one’s profile as a fearless, edgy storyteller. The Safdie brothers are known for their provocative stories, no doubt, but it’s clear their motivations are genuine, rooted in a fundamental empathy for people from all walks of life. This aspect is evident in HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT’s script, adapted by Josh in collaboration with Holmes herself, as well as his DADDY LONGLEGS (2009) collaborator Ronald Bronstein. Their adaptation presents Holmes’ memoir as a series of slice-of-life portraits anchored by her romantic conflicts with Ilya, beginning with her suicide attempt after a fight caused by her drug-fueled infidelity and subsequently charting her hardscrabble existence within the cold concrete canyons of Manhattan.
Holmes creates a thinly-fictionalized version of herself in her performance as Harley, acting with the understanding that HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT would be her Big Chance to create a new, better life for herself. Indeed, the production would go far as to finance her stint in rehab, and despite the constant triggers of shooting a film about her addiction, Holmes would remain clean and sober throughout the duration of the shoot (1). Josh’s inclinations about her aesthetic magnetism prove correct, as Holmes delivers a riveting, earthy performance that pulses with creative abandon while absolving itself of vanity. Other filmmakers might orient Harley’s suicide attempt as the climactic event, but Josh, Bronstein and Holmes place it as the opening to the existential unmooring to follow; as HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT unspools, Harley is in a kind of free-fall, desperately searching for anything she can cling to— be it the diminishing returns of her growing drug dependency or the comfort of her fellow fiends. This rogue’s gallery of non-actors lend a significant degree of realism to the proceedings, with the standouts being Necro, an underground hip hop artist known for his extreme lyrics (2) playing a mindful but pushy (and ultimately self-interested) enabler of Harley’s addiction, and fellow junkie/dealer/casual love interest Mike, played by the distinctively-featured Buddy Duress— also a street guy with no formal acting training and an active warrant out for his arrest during the entirety of the shoot (he was ultimately arrested the day after production wrapped, and would still be serving time when the film premiered (1)).
Indeed, there’s only one professional actor among the whole lot: Caleb Landry Jones, decked out in a scary get-up of long, stringy black hair and filthy hands. His chilling performance as the callous, continuously strung-out Ilya benefits from working directly with his real-life counterpart in an advisory capacity throughout the shoot. A dangerous young man armed with — of all things — concealed ninja stars, Landry’s Ilya only cares about getting high, holding Harley in so little regard he’s capable of flippantly encouraging her suicide, or abandoning her without warning on a long-haul bus ride. It’s certainly unconventional to have a story’s de facto villain present to give input and advice during the shoot, but Landry’s performance is enriched and deepened by his presence. The filmmakers even go so far as to dedicate HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT to Ilya’s memory; between production and release, Ilya would pass away from an overdose. Considering the fiery manner in how the Safdies’ story chooses to conclude Ilya’s character arc within the film, thus diverging greatly from the historical record, his passing becomes almost like a time-travel paradox in which the discrepancy between two diverging timelines is forcibly reconciled. Art imitates life, which then imitates art— a grimy, heroin-fueled feedback loop.
Beyond the contributions of Bronstein and Eleonore Hendricks (who makes a brief cameo as a junkie overwhelmed by a near-fatal overdose on Ilya’s part), HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT finds Josh and Benny leveling up their storytelling by bringing new collaborators into their orbit. After working under the loose organization of their Red Bucket Collective for their previous films, they would establish Elara Pictures as an official production company of sorts, formed to provide the kind of infrastructure necessary to harness the creative momentum generated by their ascendancy on the international festival circuit. For many filmmakers, there’s a certain degree of professional success inherent in the mere fact that they no longer have to produce their own work; HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT finds the Safdies achieving that level, working with producer Oscar Boyson and their Elara co-founder Sebastian Bear-McClard (who has since been ejected from Elara after serious criminal accusations related to sexual grooming and assault were leveled against him). The film retains the handheld street-cinema style that defined THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED and DADDY LONGLEGS, but here the furtive aesthetic is palpably enriched by the greater array of resources at the brothers’ disposal.
Though their short-form work would often embrace the accessibility of digital video, a major component of Josh and Benny’s feature output up to this point had been a dogged insistence on shooting celluloid film. Their earlier features had been made during the apex of the indie mumblecore movement — a wave wrought by digital video’s promise of democratization — so their choice to shoulder the added financial and logistical burdens of photochemical film in a microbudget context speaks magnitudes. HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT was shot by cinematographer Sean Price Williams on the Sony F3 camcorder, making it the Safdies’ first digital feature. Though its combination of claustrophobic closeups, on-the-fly rack zooms and long focal lengths convey an undeniable style, it’s equally true that the cinematography is an example of style following function. The film looks this way because it has to; the production was not granted permits, so rather than recalibrate (and possibly compromise) the material, the creative team decided to risk the blatant flouting of convention in the name of artistic integrity. The smaller form factors of digital cameras and minuscule production footprint become valuable assets in this regard, enabling a covert approach that has the added benefit of further immersing their actors in their performances. Long lenses and wireless lavalier mics (operated on the fly by Benny, no less) enable the team to shoot from a distance, be it from across the street, hidden away in parked cars, or tucked away in a nearby tower looking down on the action from above. The frame, rendered in HD video’s native aspect ratio of 1.78:1, is often composed using natural obstructions — trees, open shelving, windows, even clouds of hot steam that waft up from grates on the sidewalk. The filmmakers also embrace the perceived “flatness” inherent to the digital medium, manifest in a low-contrast aesthetic that embraces its’ late fall/early winter setting and the drab colorlessness of the concrete locales. Production Designer Audrey Turner echoes this conceit by largely avoiding color in the set dressings and costumes; save for the occasional pop of Skully’s neon red windbreaker or the searing pink light of Harley’s crash loft built within a friend’s apartment, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT deals mostly in shades of black, white and gray. There is, simply put, very little hope here.
If the suffocating nature of the film’s mise-en-scene can be described as a nightmare, then Paul Grimstead and Ariel Pink most definitely understand the assignment. Taking their cues from Benny and Ronald Bronstein’s episodic and labyrinthine edit, Grimstead and Pink deliver an original score that could accompany a twisted video game from hell, where all paths lead to “Game Over”. The jittery synths and MIDI-influenced textures are reminiscent of the 80’s horror of John Carpenter, cranked to a continuous boil that threatens to spill out from the characters and onto the street. In one of the Safdies’ more-inspired creative choices, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT also features the work of influential synth composer Isao Tomita, whose haunting electronic arrangement of Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” from Suite Bergamasque further propels the warped, chemical-induced fantasy that the film’s characters are constantly chasing. It becomes a poignant respite from the agitated grind of the surrounding soundtrack, underscoring Harley’s fragility and soliciting the audience’s sympathy for a plight she lost any control over a long time ago.
HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT could be seen as the Safdie brothers’ last “obscure” feature before making their mark on mainstream audiences with their follow-up, GOOD TIME (2017). As such, it’s also the most aggressive, take-no-prisoners example of their artistic signatures. Though plainly evident to varying degrees in their preceding short-form work, DADDY LONGLEGS would see Josh and Benny hit upon the unique storytelling power of anxiousness— of entertaining the audience by way of making them supremely uncomfortable. It’s not unlike the cringe comedy of shows like CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, in that both instances find us helplessly watching a character flail to increasingly-desperate depths in a manner that provokes a perverse delight. Think of it as a kind of twisted catharsis, allowing the audience to think: “I may have it bad, but holy crap am I glad I’m not that guy”. HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT is fully stocked with these so-called “undesirables”, handpicked for their provocative distinctiveness by the Safdies during their signature street-casting sessions. The avoidance of trained actors has always lent a grimy authenticity to their films; it’s a quality that’s simpatico with their preference for staging their stories in New York City. It’s no wonder why: in what other city could an artist find such a wide range of eclectic and eccentric faces? Even without the veneer of film grain, there is a palpable texture to the Safdies’ work: gritty, grimy, abrasive, unpredictable. Their influences are conspicuous, but it is arguably this peculiar alchemy of documentary realism mixed with the absurd and the fantastical — real/stolen locations, unseemly performers plucked off the street, and exaggerated narrative scenarios — that distinguishes the Safdie brothers’ filmmaking with an inimitable voice.
Continuing the pair’s seemingly-supernatural ability to command the attention of the world’s foremost cinematic tastemakers, HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT would premiere at the Venice International Film Festival and be quickly snapped up for distribution by RADiUS and The Weinstein Company. Unlike DADDY LONGLEGS’s release, there would be no need for Benny to slip into a sandwich board and hawk flyers for screenings on the subway; HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT would receive a strategic limited rollout and garner praise from prominent critics around the country. “All this desperation and squalor reeks of authenticity”, writes The Boston Globe’s Peter Keough, while The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday picks up on the Safdies’ primary thematic intentions by describing the film as “a narrowly constructed prison of desperation and need”. However, it might be Josh himself who would have the most incisive take on the finished film. During a Q&A following a screening at South By Southwest, he would simply observe that “love is the greatest drug we have”, expertly amplifying his film’s impact by pointing out its disturbing and immediate relatability to the audience (3). HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT may feel like it takes place on an alien planet, but its message cuts too close to home for any semblance of comfort. Love is a beautiful, but irrational, thing, making us capable of any number of insanities. It can hurt us, make us sick, and we can even overdose it, but we keep coming back again and again because the high is just that undeniable. We’re willing to suffer for it, to die for it, to kill for it. Love makes junkies of us all, capable of heaven knows what.
HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT is currently available on high definition Blu Ray via Anchor Bay Entertainment.
Credits:
Written by: Josh Safdie, Ronald Bronstein, Arielle Holmes
Produced by: Sebastian Bear-McClard, Oscar Boyson
Director of Photography: Sean PRice Williams
Production Designer: Audrey Turner
Edited by: Benny Safdie, Ronald Bronstein
Music by: Paul Grimstead and Ariel Pink
References
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