Cannibals terrorise Venice with ‘Bad’ – ‘Action-adventure fairytale a love letter to America’

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VENICE, Sept 7, (Agencies): Ana Lily Amirpour brought a cannibal love story starring Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves to the Venice Film Festival Tuesday with “Bad Batch”, a savage fairytale which the up-and-coming director compared to an orgasm.

The hotly anticipated follow-up to Amirpour’s Iranian vampire western “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” (2014) tells the tale of a young girl who wanders a desert wasteland in a futuristic United States.

The film stars Britain’s Suki Waterhouse (of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), as Arlen, a misfit who is cast out into the desert, where she is captured by a community of cannibals and eaten bit by bit, kept alive to ensure her flesh stays fresh as one by one her limbs get the chop.

Salvation not only from the cooking pot but the nightmarish society may lie with cannibal Miami Man (Jason Momoa of “Game of Thrones” fame), whose child Miel (Jayda Fink) Arlen takes under her wing.

US stars Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey have smaller but key roles as a commune leader and hermit in the story, which critics read as a cautionary tale for today’s American society.

“At a time when presidential candidate Donald Trump is advocating the construction of a physical wall to protect the national purity of the American population,” the story of exiling undesirables to a fenced-off wasteland “doesn’t sound all that dystopian,” Variety magazine said.

Competing

Amirpour told the world’s oldest film festival, where the flick is competing for the prized Golden Lion, that the “action-adventure fairytale” was “a love letter” to America.

She said she had been influenced by Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 action adventure “Romancing the Stone”, as well as the Westerns she used to watch with her father.

In researching the film, she spent a year getting to know a community of people who live “off the grid” in the desert in California in a place called “Slab City”, and said most of the extras used had been locals.

Former model Waterhouse, 24, said she had been drawn to the role from the very first moment, but playing it had felt “like I was an orange being peeled. I was absolutely terrified and stayed terrified throughout”.

Amirpour said she had had no qualms about presenting slapstick master Carrey, famed for films such as “Ace Ventura” (1994) and Bruce Almighty (2003), with a non-speaking role as “I feel like in a way he is the hermit”.

“The hermit is so important. He’s the soul, the kindness in this harsh environment” in the film, she said.

“He’s also the homeless man you ignore on every street corner. I feel like it’s the same thing with Carrey: being that famous, no-one really sees who you are”.

Amirpour, who also cited “The NeverEnding Story” and “Princess Bride” as among her influences, said she identifies with all the characters in her blood-splattered offering and sees it as an exploration of self.

Massive

“I’m just trying to figure out who I am. It’s this huge, massive thing, figuring out who you are. You have to constantly strip it back down to its basic elements.

“You have to devastate your reality and everything you know, how you understand the system that you exist it, to be able to evaluate yourself,” she said.

As well as self-analysis, there was also an element of self-pleasure to the film, she said, particularly in the choice of the soundtrack, which is dominated by Brooklyn electro duo Darkside.

“Explaining how I picked the music would be like explaining how I have …. It’s very hard to explain, it just feels right and turns me on so much and then I’m just coming all over place,” she said.

Playing a society reject who tries to survive in a desert wasteland after having her limbs cut off by cannibals was a terrifying experience, British model-turned-actress Suki Waterhouse said at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday.

The 24-year-old actress landed her first major role with “The Bad Batch”, which premieres in Venice and is one of 20 US and international movies competing for the coveted Golden Lion that will be announced on Saturday.

“I was absolutely terrified and I stayed terrified throughout the whole thing,” Waterhouse told a press conference ahead of the movie’s official premiere.

Shooting in the desert and portraying a character with a prosthetic leg and without an arm was a challenge both physically and mentally, said the actress, who has modelled for fashion house Burberry.

“I’m a girl from London who’s been in a different industry, and I was suddenly like kaplonked in the salt and sea.”

Writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour described her second feature film as a “action-adventure-fairytale” that explores the lives of people on the margins of society and the limits of survival and human understanding.

Amirpour said the movie was shot in the Californian desert and she spent a year visiting a local community called Slab City, whose inhabitants, living in trailers and off the grid, eventually became extras on the set.

The movie also stars Jason Momoa as Miami Man, one of the cannibals, Keanu Reeves as The Dream, the cult leader of the community where Arlen finds safety, and Jim Carrey, as the mute hermit who wanders around the desert with a shopping cart and at one point saves both Miami Man and Arlen.

About offering an experienced actor like Carrey a role with only a few scenes and no dialogue, she said the “Dumb and Dumber” actor known for his facial expressions and quick wit understood the character’s importance because of the parallels to his own life as a celebrity.

Still, as sophomore slumps go, “The Bad Batch” remains a seductive one, alive with electric imagery and inchoate ideas regarding heroism in the margins, and the fundamental inequity of the American Dream. Would that Amirpour trusted the subtext of her own script a bit more: There’s surely little need for on-screen billboards bearing slogans like, “You can’t enter the Dream, the Dream enters you.”

Happily, Amirpour’s visual storytelling has rather more fluency and wit. The film’s near-wordless opening reel is sensational, setting up its nightmare near-future America with crisp economy.

Yet “The Bad Batch” rarely delves more searchingly beneath such glib surface commentary to expose deeper yearnings in its imagined American hinterland: As a deranged hobo (Giovanni Ribisi) gestures toward his half-complete jigsaw puzzle of the Star-Spangled Banner, it’s the blunt symbol we’re invited to consider, not its damaged human presenter.

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