Shy People

 Director Andrei Konchalovsky has made films in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Russia.  He is highly respected but, with a few exceptions, seems to never have achieved the excellence to which he aspires.  In the United States, he was largely the victim of low budgets and bad scripts.  However, his 1987 film, Shy People is based on his own screenplay and seems to represent on film his intentions.  (The movie was conceived years earlier when Konchalovsky was directing his magnum opus, the Siberiade in the Soviet Union.)  The film's somewhat primitive and simple-minded premise is that of a City Mouse (played by Jill Clayburgh) visiting her Country Mouse cousin (Barbara Hershey); the contrivances required to set the plot in motion don't really work and many aspects of the film are implausible -- but the situation is sufficiently rich for Konchalovsky to engineer a compelling, if histrionic, story that allows for its actors to deliver "over-the-top" performances.  The film bears certain resemblances to one of Konchalovsky's masterpieces Runaway Train (1985), an action film based on a similarly ludicrous and overwrought script by no less than Akira Kurosawa.  Both movies exploit a ridiculous premise executed with no irony and total conviction -- both movies feature an exotic location (Louisiana bayous in Shy People and the Alaskan wilderness in Runaway Train -- and both films end with a final quote somewhat pretentiously displayed before ending credits.  

In Shy People, a pampered lady journalist (she writes for Cosmopolitan) contrives a trip to the remote bayous of Louisiana to write a story about her country cousins.  (Her grandfather was brother to the grandfather who is the progenitor of the primitive clan in the swamps.)  The journalist, named Diane, has a daughter who is about 17 and a spoiled brat.  The daughter uses cocaine and flaunts her promiscuity -- her boyfriend is a forty-year old junkie with whom the Diane may have had a fling.  Diane is surprised that her daughter Grace is willing to make the trip (it involves flying first class) to Louisiana to visit the country cousins.  It's obvious to the viewer that Grace is a ticking time-bomb.

In Louisiana, Diane hires a backwoods boatman to ferry her into the swamps to place where her cousin's wife lives -- a large Victorian house nicely appointed on a levee in the middle of nowhere.  There was once a town around the house but a flood has swept everything away but the big, airy manse.  The family living in the house is an example of the Southern Gothic carried to a hysterical extreme:  Ma, Ruth, was a 12-year old bride to the sinister Joe, a patriarch of the kind that Burl Ives used to play in his vicious villain mode.  Joe has vanished, but not before brutalizing everyone in the family.  Ruth has four sons:  one of them Mike runs a strip club and bar in the nearby town, a nasty place dependent on trade from oil rig roughnecks -- he has a pencil moustache and looks like smarmy small-town used car dealer.  Mark has his own child bride, the plump and pregnant Candy.  He's a swamp rat, fishing for crabs and shrimp in the muddy backwaters of the bayou.  Tommy is some kind of psychopath that Ma keeps locked in a shed.  He's handsome and friendly but something is wrong with him and he seems to be glad to remain out of trouble in his barred cell out in the yard.  The youngest son, Pauly, is a half-wit, the product of his father, Joe's well-placed punch (or two punches) to his mother's belly during the flood that swept away the town around the house.  Pauly is slavishly loyal to his mother and the baby of the family.  Joe has fled from the revenuers into the inaccessible swamps and is either dead or a malign spirit hiding in the lagoons; he is represented in the movie by a lurid surreal portrait showing his glaring white face emerging from the black canvas.  The portrait hangs over his empty chair at the dinner table that is kept vacant for him.  Joe had the habit of hanging ma upside down and beating the hell out of her and the sons, needless to say, are a bit ambivalent about him.   

A poacher named Jake has assaulted Mark in the spectral swamp, draped in fog and vines and with stumps standing in water like tombstones.  Ma is encouraged to make a complaint to the law in a nearby town.  With Diane and restive, discontent daughter-in-law, Ruth makes a trip to town, using her boat's outboard motor to power her way through a vast colonnade of opposing concrete columns -- it's the underpinning of an enormously long bridge crossing a tidal lake: the image of the boat making its way between the columns, lit by slanting sunlight is the film's signature image, a scene that illumines the rather squalid proceedings with classical splendor -- it's as if we are seeing a Greek myth unfold.  In town, a hellscape of trash, men toting alligators like sacks of potatoes over their shoulders, detritus of beer cans and candy wrappers and junked cars inexplicably being dumped in the lagoon, Ma reluctantly appeals to the sheriff.  He refuses to do anything for her.  So, while the daughter-in-law and Diane are shopping for a battery-powered TV, Ruth goes to the local strip club, a decaying barn-like building, and shoots off Jake's hand.  The strip club is run by her son, Mike, and, when he remonstrates with her, she goes berserk, becomes a temperance crusader, and trashes his bottles of booze, terrorizing the hapless strippers.  Meanwhile back at the ranch, Grace has twisted through the bars to Tommy's cage and seduced him.  Pauly reports the transgression to Mark.  Mark is enraged and threatens both Tommy and Grace.  So Grace decides to soothe the savage breast with copious doses of cocaine offered to all three  boys.  This leads to what Maurice Sendak called "a wild rumpus" including Mark's rape of Grace in thick puddle of spilled honey.  (Konchalovsky goes for supersize effects.)  There's lots of fighting, grunting and shouting and Grace departs from the orgy in a canoe which gradually sinks in the alligator-filled swamp.  Ma returns and tells Mark to discipline Tommy with some kind of iron rod.  Tommy is beaten to a pulp and ends up comatose.  Now, Diane, horrified at the enormity of the "wild rumpus", flees the compound and also ends up marooned in the swamp with her pontoon boat spinning around in forlorn circles.

It all turns out okay once the two women learn life-lessons from one another.  Diane learns that she needs to discipline Grace, albeit not with an iron rod, and become her mother and not her best friend.  (Konchalovsky, like most Russians, I think is very conservative as to family and domestic matters.)  Ruth comes to terms with the malign influence of the ghostly Joe, who has been hanging around and watching the affray through the fog.  The movie is lurid nonsense but beautifully made and effectively acted.  Konchalovsky wrote the script for Andrei Tarkovsky's first movie, Ivan's Childhood, and much of the imagery from that film has seeped into Shy People -- most spectacularly, the wilderness of water and forest in which there seems to be no solid ground and people and objects appear to float in the misty chaos.  (This is the landscape where the boy-soldier, Ivan, spends his hellish childhood.)  The swamp in Shy People has an enormous foggy menace and Konchalovsky suggests that his "shy people" (a local euphemism for wild critters who engage in murderous blood feuds) are formed by the chaotic watery soup in which they live.  The movie has a strange moral that makes no sense to me, but I'm not a Russian.  In the Book of Revelations, the Messiah says that he will save those who are hot and cold but will renounce those who are lukewarm.  Being hot and cold here means possessing strong and savage emotions of love and hate.  The film suggests that true humanity resides in the passions and that reason and civilization are merely veneers that we use to persuade ourselves that we are not nothing more than beasts.