A cold Sunday evening to spend among Bristol’s four skies. I imagine it will be the case of most of the Sundays spent in this city but in any event, Watershed will always be a good haven during those hazy ends of the week. From a few swipes on my phone to a call later on, I took my big cinematographic expectations and a friend of mine to see Funny Pages.
standing ovation at 2022 Cannes festival
Throughout 86 minutes of filming, Owen Kline signs his first full-length feature. The man who has started his cinematographic career as an actor (The Squid and the Whale, 2005) has already broken through the selective arena of promising directors. And for good reason, premiering at the 2022 Directors’ Fortnight of Cannes Film Festival last May, Funny Pages received a three-minute standing ovation.
The movie depicts a teenage schoolboy called Robert, played by American actor Daniel Zolghadri. In the aftermath of the completely burlesque death of his art teacher, Robert decides to take his fate into his own hands. As the only child of a somehow lenient couple, Robert let his soul wander towards his passion: cartoon drawings.
Throughout a bildungsroman pastiche, the handful of people present in the cinema were able to see Robert leaving both high school and the familial cozy nest, to living in an odd, shared basement, becoming a lawyer’s script or a comics seller. Wherever he goes, a mural of characters arise by a series of continuous touches, and all of them sharing the particularity of making Robert’s lifepath move forward. Wallace, the old “colour separator” admired by Robert will be especially remembered, as well as Miles (high school boy, significantly less talented) whose every appearance on screen succeeded on making me increasingly uncomfortable.
In the end, Funny Pages recounts a short story of the 1990s’ big history. Even if I specify that the storyline takes place in the United States, the location is in reality anecdotal. Indeed, the 1990s were a time of symbolic upheaval, a point of reversal that turned the Western world upside down: the advent of criticism of consumer society increasingly called for alternatives, causing an underground atmosphere to return in force.
Thanks to its kodak filming, Funny Pages is a veritable ode to the indie atmosphere, which (foul) odours can be smelt through the screen – mostly those of perspiration emanating from the shared basement. This ode is also emphasized by a meta dimension: the evident talent of Robert goes with an unbounded attraction for an old and outdated cartoonist as well as for archived comics. Robert refuses his parents’ normative lifestyle, declines his flatmates’ mediocrity and is naturally established as a veritable model for Miles.
Funny Pages is also an opportunity to put the spotlight on a hero who perseveres in his dreams and perpetuates the existence of leakage paths – these nifty unbeaten paths so rare when disillusion and Wallace’s faux pas spur to go back to a comfortable life.
But Funny Pages also marks the return of indie cinema, dark comedies at the dawn of 2023, and we hope to see Daniel Zolghardi stealing the scene again very soon.