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Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, about a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who falls for a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) and follows her to a commune full of celebrity impersonators based out of a Scottish castle, would make an incredible double-feature paired with Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness. Both films deal with people who have fled to the Highlands in denial of real-world mundaneity and in exploration of an escapist fiction. Korine’s long-awaited comeback feature may be a bit more on the nose about the desperate things we do in the name of absolving our lonely fates, but like Build a Ship, it rides the line between pure shtick and genuine emotion to a degree of success that, when it works, can be truly thrilling. Neither is perfect, but both are among my favorite films I’ve seen this year.

Korine has always been a filmmaker who plugs narrative in the gaps around visual one-liners, and while Mister Lonely is a more traditional shot-reverse shot narrative than anything Korine has done before, from the opening shot the director confirms that, in some sense, he’s up to his old tricks. Luna’s Michael Jackson, decked out in familiar sunglasses, black armband, standard issue surgical face mask, rides through the streets of Paris on a kiddie motorcycle with a toy monkey tied to the rear. Shot in slow motion, set to Bobby Vinton’s rendition of the title song, it’s both punchline and four-dimensional painting. Lonely is wall-to-wall comprised of comparable sequences which, though maybe only a step or two away or above the kinds of cultural regurgitations that litter YouTube––Marilyn Monroe, her hair in curlers, comes to Michael Jackson’s room and seduces him by feeding him a strawberry; Abe Lincoln, lit only by strobe light, recites the Gettysburg Address whilst spinning a basketball on his finger––together add up to surprisingly poignant portrait of the willful abandonment of reality in favor of pop cultural oblivion.

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During a Q&A session after one of the first short film blocks at this year’s SXSW, an audience member turned the spotlight on programmer Lya Guerra and asked her about the curatorial aspects of her job, and how she organizes the order of the selected films. It was a great question, one that’s not asked often enough, and it put a bit of perspective on the art of programming a festival (and, indeed, programming is as much an art form as making a film). Short films at festivals cannot by necessity function in isolation, and it takes a real love of film to curate a program as strong as the one Lya has assembled this year; a lot of consideration has to go into not just what films make the cut, but which one might compliment another. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, and I’d imagine that there are always some pieces that just don’t quite fit, no matter how good they might be.

Here, readers, I must offer full disclosure: a film of mine was one of those that apparently did fit. When I compliment the lineup, though, I don’t mean to be self-aggrandizing; it was truly an honor to be featured alongside these other films. I’ve already written about Glory At Sea; now let me turn my attention to a few of my favorites.

Small Apartment (dir. Andrew T. Betzer)

In a tiny urban apartment, on a bright spring mid-morning, a young couple make love. As one of Wagner’s Vorspiels swells through the tinny speakers of a radio, the man’s aged father watches the couple in the throes of their passion, peering through a small partition in the bathroom wall with a video camera in his hand.

What Betzer’s created out of this conflict of interest is a simple, quietly heartbreaking glimpse at the pure beauty of physical intimacy with another human being. The film is fairly explicit (it played in the Adults Only category when it premiered at Slamdance this past January) but is not lascivious in its intentions: rather, it offers a strong and pointed delineation between sex and pornography, between love and perversion. I was afraid this film would be too subtle to win people over, but no: it wound up winning the Grand Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking. Bravo.

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