Cast: Brent Barr, Jennifer Bass, Janey Bergam
Director: Adam Rehmeier
Country: USA
Genre: Drama , Fantasy
Watch it: Here
Editor’s Notes: The following review is a continuation of Matthew Blevins’ Subversive Saturday series.
A mysterious stranger is washed upon the shores of a strange land, presumably freed of the sinister driving forces and sins of an old life that is never clearly articulated, leaving the viewer to wonder what evils have driven this man to seek redemption and invent himself anew. This new Jonas would be driven by the singular purpose of bringing the word of god to a cynical world, a weary world bereft of miracles and unwanted surprises that might interfere with the menial tasks that constitute the joyless lives of its bored inhabitants. Jonas reinvents his life and dedicates it to his singular divine task, fastidiously attending to his grooming and physique and rehearsing normalcy to the mirror as he works to perfect his sales pitch. God is a difficult thing to give away these days.
This malevolent land of dubious promises is filmed by Rehmeier with a stripped down color pallet that accentuates the drab and sinister underbelly of the city that reminded us that the dream was over.
Jonas harbors a vacancy of the soul, half present, conflicted between his tortured inner thoughts and his desperate attempts to connect with a god that isn’t available for instant and clear answers. He travels the streets of LA as an alien amidst the apathetic automatons that are too cynical to allow faith to interfere with their unfulfilled existences. They amble along the streets of the promised land of eternal sunshine and opportunity, burdened by the weight of unfulfilled dreams and broken lives. This malevolent land of dubious promises is filmed by Rehmeier with a stripped down color pallet that accentuates the drab and sinister underbelly of the city that reminded us that the dream was over. We could go no further west to escape as we would always be doomed to relish in the emptiness of a self-imposed meaningless existence. If Jonas was truly driven by divine forces they would recognize the futility of his zeal. It is impossible to spread a word of selflessness in a culture driven by narcissism and apathy.
The characters never “wink” to the camera during scenes of incidental humor, the comedy simply surfaces as this odd character tries to deliver his deadpan message of divinity
Rehmeier has a unique filmmaking technique that allows a performer to find their character and define the idiosyncrasies that make them live and breathe. Once this character is borne into the world, Rehmeier allows the character to interact with it, creating wonderfully organic opportunities for soul baring honesty as people that occupy more tangible realities try to interact with this fully formed creation of odd fears and uncomfortable motives. This allows for wonderful opportunities of humor as Jonas’ stony demeanor tries to conceal insecurities and naiveté when confronted with the realities of a city with no shortage of strange characters with their own idiosyncratic motivations. The characters never “wink” to the camera during scenes of incidental humor, the comedy simply surfaces as this odd character tries to deliver his deadpan message of divinity to an diverse array of people that are either politely disinterested, increasingly uncomfortable, or creepily on board with his resolute message. The pulsing score and deranged monotone voice-over by Jonas creates an oppressive weight of uncertainty and anticipation as Rehmeier’s earlier work reminds us that this film could go in any number of dark directions, but JONAS merely occupies the same sinister world of the Bunny Game, never opening the dark doors where unspeakable horrors are carried about in routine banality.
JONAS is a fascinating character study of a man seeking redemption for a past life of sins that are never articulated, attempting to deliver salvation to the apathetic land of empty promises and oppressive sunshine that reveals the death of the American dream with unrelenting luminosity. Its improvisational structure allows for organic truthfulness as the characters react honestly and anti-dramatically to this odd and menacing zealot, creating darkly subversive and revealing humor. This is a cynical generation, bereft of the dishonest influence of dubious miracles and steeped in the anticlimactic realities of lives without mystery. Jonas goes out into this world to sell his unwanted message with unwavering conviction, but will his soul be as steadfast without the tangible proof of divinity that he is trying to sell?
[notification type=”star”]83/100 ~ GREAT. JONAS is a fascinating character study of a man seeking redemption for a past life of sins that are never articulated, attempting to deliver salvation to the apathetic land of empty promises and oppressive sunshine that reveals the death of the American dream with unrelenting luminosity. Its improvisational structure allows for organic truthfulness as the characters react honestly and anti-dramatically to this odd and menacing zealot, creating darkly subversive and revealing humor.[/notification]
