The Top of his Head

Peter Mettler's unsuccessful "The Top of his Head" is ambitious, mysterious, and, often, very beautiful. But this 1989 Canadian art film is also a complete mess -- too many ideas thrown together almost randomly on the screen in mash-up with acting so ludicrously awful that it is unintentionally comical. A Toronto man named Gus Victor works selling discs for satellite TV. One night, he is stalled at a railroad track, falls asleep, and, when he awakes, he isn't (as they say) in Kansas any more. Some nasty thugs dog him for reasons that are never explained. He tracks an enigmatic woman, Lucy, who seems to be an avant-garde artist -- in the promising opening scene, she fakes labor pains and, then, pretends to give birth to a monkey wearing dapper head-gear. (The headgear turns out to be some kind of apparatus for measuring the simian's brain waves.) During Victor's wanderings, he encounters a dying woman documenting her last months by taking photographs of things that she finds beautiful. Victor rambles around in the woods, is threatened and, even, mildly tortured by the bad guys, operatives of some sort of secret government agency. At the movie's climax, Victor enters a performance space where men are slinging speakers lit with bright spotlights in circles while dancers writhe and wriggle in alcoves and Lucy intones music that sounds a little like Meredith Monk. This performance imagery is startling and holds the viewer's attention but the film, as a whole, amounts to nothing at all. And it's inexplicably, nightmarishly boring -- all the dialogue is hushed and cryptic and to call the acting wooden is to give it too much credit: no one seems to know what the film is about and the characters mouth their lines with amateurish and misguided intensity. All of this is intercut with pictures showing satellites carooming through space, gorgeous landscapes, sinister looking city skylines and weird industrial deserts. The thugs are notably ill-conceived; the scenes involving their interrogations of Victor and Lucy are like outtakes from the episodes featuring Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet". But, unlike that film, there's not really a trace of humor in this picture. I saw this movie when I was dead-tired, slept through many scenes, and prayed for the thing to reach its end. The performance piece involving speaker feedback and the wonderfully Copernican spectacle of the lights mounted on the speakers orbiting around the statuesque men flinging them in circles seems is wonderful enough -- but this is only a two or three minute sequence in the movie and, from a narrative perspective, wholly inexplicable.