East of Sunset
East of Sunset is the
story of two alcoholic drug-users who fall in love in the slightly
bedraggled Silverlake section of Los Angeles. This may sound like a
dismissal of the film, but it is nothing of the sort. While I'd be
hard-pressed to call East of Sunset a really good film, it does have
an immediacy, a skid row vibe which makes it frequently fascinating.
If the film sometimes suffers from a surplus of ideas, a scarcity of happy
characters and a lack of money, it is still a charming little story.
Emily Stiles deserves the
acclaim (including winning the Best Actress Award at the Method Fest 2005)
that she has received for playing Carley, a numb, rather miserable barfly
whose life is a series of one night stands, depressive episodes, Xanax,
alcohol and weed. One night when stood up by a date at a new bar, she
meets the bartender Jim (Jimmy Wayne Farley) and they begin upon an on
again-off again love relationship. Carley finds it hard to let him in
because she is convinced he will hurt her, so she uses every excuse she can
to break up with him; everything from insisting it be just a physical
relationship to becoming angered when struggling artist Jim actually gets a
SoHo gallery showing in New York. Then she totally freezes him out
when she finds out he has used heroin. (She's okay with Xanax and
marijuana, but she has to draw the line somewhere...)
Acting as sounding boards
and alternatives to the romantic turmoil are Ella (Dikla Marshall) and Alan
(George Garritano), the best friends, who are there for dual purposes; to be
supportive and yet also to tempt their friends to do the wrong thing. In fact, all the relationships in
this world seem to revolve around (not necessarily in this order) sex,
alcohol, drugs and/or whether the leads are in a relationship or just
screwing around.
The movie was obviously
filmed on a shoestring budget the entire thing is shot on four locations;
her apartment, his loft, a (supposedly) SoHo New York art gallery and the local bar (which
may be a real bar but it looks strangely like an unfinished set.)
However this sparse poverty (despite the fact that each of them has a huge
apartment) is somehow fitting for this minimalistic, vaguely kitschy and
overtly depressed world.
The last character, and one
that suffuses the whole movie, is the early music of Tom Waits. The
entire soundtrack is made up of songs from Waits' first eight albums.
Well, not exactly Waits' music. They apparently could not get the
rights to the real thing, so instead they pepper the movie with low key
(mostly instrumental) cover versions by the bar house band named (the)
caseworker and a bunch of tracks culled from two tribute albums released on
Manifesto Records called
Step Right Up (1995) and New Coat of Paint (2000). This explains the Executive Producer credit for
Evan S. Cohen, the president of Manifesto and the nephew of Waits' estranged
former business manager Herb Cohen, who retains the publishing rights to all
of these tunes.
In the end, though, East
of Sunset is a nice little addition to the skid-row-love movie genre,
like films like Charles Bukowski's Barfly, or Echo Park or
McArthur Park. (It's probably not a coincidence that three
of those four films are named after areas of Los Angeles...) Or, a
little more subtly, the film recalls Tom Waits' musical Frank's Wild
Years. However, as good as East of Sunset can be, is not
nearly as cutting edge as it believes it is in fact it's a rather
standard and occasionally melodramatic romance where two misfits finally
meet someone who understands them. It's just dressed in funky clothes.
(9/05)
Jay
S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2005
PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved.
Posted: September 17,
2005.
