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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