Weird Love Stories: "Strawberry Mansion" (2021), "Aloha, Bobby and Rose" (1975)

Few directors are able to truly grasp dream logic and the surreal flights of fancy that accompany such subject matters. David Lynch’s name comes to mind, given his ability to craft intricate narratives surrounding the imaginary waking world. While the term "Lynchian" is often misconstrued, applied to anything that defies comprehension from a surrealist point of view, this is exactly how Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley’s Strawberry Mansion (2021) can be defined. Combining the delightful and the absurd, Strawberry Mansion is a sweet triumph, an ode to imagination, and a manifesto on the wonders of love. Anabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), is a widow who has not filed her dream taxes in years, as they have been recorded on VHS tapes instead of the mandatory “airsticks.” A maze of conspiracy is revealed: the government surreptitiously places products in people’s dreams, and the taxes imposed are ones that infringe on our innermost desires. Bella is aware of this, and the younger Bella (Grace Glowicki), whose dreams James Preble (Kentucker Audley) is auditing, comes off as mysterious, propelling the dream auditor to fall in love with her. And it is the kind of love that helps shatter the boundaries of reality and dreams, freeing the imagination in the most whimsical of ways, crafting a way for a world where anything is possible.

Considering Strawberry Mansion was made on a scant budget and the filmmakers wear their “go-along-with-your-wildest-visions” badge with pride, the film is a triumph in every sense of the term. Audley and Glowicki play star-crossed lovers divided by the oceans of space, time, and dreams, imbuing their bond with a special brand of whimsical authenticity worth rooting for. Even when the film stretches the limits of imagination, everything is still believable from a dream-logic perspective. There are so many fun connections here: shades of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stranger Than Fiction, The Congress, and even Kusturica's haunting Arizona Dream, where the four insomniac protagonists wander in and out of each others' often-incompatible dream worlds. Rather, the film’s low-budget virtuosity comes off as an end in itself—as a vital example of possibilities untapped, as an act of resistance to reclaim fantasy for independent filmmaking, for imagination that pays no rent to the overlords of intellectual propriety. Sources: rogerebert.com and newyorker.com

Watching 1975's Aloha, Bobby and Rose on long-time awaited Blu-ray (2018), courtesy of Scorpion Releasing, I became convinced that Floyd Mutrux could have been a great American director and that we failed him. There is so much Americana in Aloha, Bobby and Rose that it should be a movie talked about in the same breath as Badlands (1973). This is the movie that Jim McBride's remake of New Weave classic Breathless wanted to be, and I say that as a fan of Jim McBride's Breathless (1983). Mutrux's film is a neo-noirish poem (which dates back to Gun Crazy) that seeks beauty -- and when it can't locate it invents it -- and then unapologetically indulges in it until it reaches a state of delirium. Bobby (Paul Le Mat, who played John Milner in George Lucas' American Graffiti, 1973) and Rose (Diane Hull, who played Ellen Anderson in Elia Kazan's The Arrangement, 1969) are very much in love, but their future seems bleak. He works at a tiny LA gas station while she struggles to be a good mother. While out in the city Bobby and Rose stop at a convenience store to pick up drinks. When Bobby decides to pull a prank, the owner empties his rifle and accidentally kills the young man behind the counter. The lovers panic and instead of waiting for the police to arrive jump in Bobby's '68 Camaro and disappear into the night. 

Mutrux's film offers one of the purest nostalgia trips that one could get without being placed in an actual time machine. The story and journey that the film chronicles are simply astonishing. The director had a modest budget to work with which is why he incorporated a lot of authentic footage and yet this is precisely the reason why the whole thing feels so special now. From the trendy billboards to the busy fast-food joints to the darker corners of old Hollywood, this film oozes an unfiltered '70s atmosphere that is incredibly attractive. Adding to the magic is a brilliant soundtrack with classic tunes by the likes of Elton John ("Tiny Dancer" and "Bennie and the Jets"), Lenny Welch ("Since I Fell for You"), Stevie Wonder ("Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours"), and Little Eva ("Locomotion"). Some of the segments where the music is used are so nicely done and are so effective that they easily could have replaced the trailers that were cut to promote the film. Mutrux made the film with his best friend, William Fraker, who a few years earlier had lensed Bullitt and Rosemary's Baby. It's a secret American classic (The New Yorker's critic Richard Brody called it "a minor masterwork of doomed romanticism") and makes me think the industry somehow did Floyd Mutrux dirty, because if he had a movie like this in him, they needed to have given Mutrux a vote of confidence. Source: blu-ray.com