True seat-of-the-pants indies are more talked about than actually made; scratch many an alleged indie and you’ll find a big studio or a big bankroll lurking behind it. Not so with Otto Buj’s intriguing first feature. Buj is a film programmer and archivist from Windsor, Canada (known primarily as that gambling town across the border from Detroit) who shot The Eternal Present for about $60,000. He apparently did everything but mop the floors. (Well, he may have done that too.) He’s listed as director, producer, writer, cinematographer, editor, and set designer, though he uses a large cast and there are other crew. All this energy pays off in one of the more striking studies in urban paranoia and alienation in quite some time. As a programmer, Buj was obviously schooled in the masters, and The Eternal Present has a formalist panache and sophistication that keeps it watchable even when the seams are showing.
Craig Gloster plays Tim, a grim young man who gets a job doing obituaries for a local newspaper. As if that weren’t depressing enough, it seems that Tim has more of a hand in these obits than merely writing them. He helps an old lady across the street, and the next day she’s dead. He meets a sexy girl at a nightclub, and voila, a beautiful corpse. It doesn’t help that some of Tim’s assignments are delivered by a supposed co-worker that nobody knows. From here the film spirals into a Twilight Zone-style mind-fuck as Tim becomes increasingly unhinged, and what we see on screen may or may not be happening outside his head.
This plot sketch doesn’t capture the film’s hypnotic effect, which is like watching one of those mesmerizingly weird low-budget ‘60s black-and-white films while nodding off. Think the existential torpor of Roger Corman or Del Tenney, with a twist of Resnais and German silent expressionist film. The Eternal Present is beautifully shot, with Buj’s visual trickery at its best in a recurring motif of screen blackouts. Not just a second or two, but sometimes agonizingly long, an ingenious combination of economics (how expensive can a black screen be?) and structuralist flash. Buj also uses time-shifts to fine effect, as the events Tim experiences move choppily forward and backward almost at random in some scenes, indicating something of Tim’s merely passing relationship with reality. There are, inevitably, art-school touches (Buj was a drop-out, it seems) and hommages to film classics, e.g., Tim remaking himself as a doppelganger of the somnambulist in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. But these potentially pretentious elements in fact contribute to the otherworldly mood of this surprisingly effective debut. The DVD contains solid commentary by the articulate Mr. Buj.
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http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/51/stabs.htm#eternal ]
