To summarize the plot of Upstream Color would be like eating soup with a fork -- it’s far too abstract, too elliptical, too paradoxical to sum up neatly. The broad strokes involve a hypnotic parasite cultivated from a blue orchid. Once ingested, this parasite leaves individuals without memory. Kris, a woman who falls prey to the agent and is robbed of all belongings and sense of identity, begins a shaky relationship with Jeff, a man who’s also experienced the same ordeal. As such, the two broken individuals carry on a perplexing but earnest relationship in an attempt to make one another whole again. Somewhere along the way, a sounder technician/pig farmer strives to find a connection as he injects piglets with the parasite. And to top it off, Thoreau’s Walden features heavily throughout.
Writer, director, actor Shane Carruth caught the attention of moviegoers with his 2004 sci-fi bender Primer. It was a film that presented intriguing ideas but whose plot was unnecessarily convoluted, its execution overly complicated. In Upstream Color, Carruth tries to sculpt an existential tale of what it means to love again, to be reborn free of fears (or hopes, it seems). Carruth, who also edited and scored the film, arranges the film in such a complex self-referential framework that all narrative logic, emotional anchors, and thematic meaning are left to be vaguely interpreted by the audience, to put it gently.
I don’t ordinarily prefer abstract storytelling. I admire films with a strong focus and deft execution -- I like to know that each setup or camera move builds to something tangible. This is why I believe David Fincher is the best director working today -- his sense of character, motive, space, and time is unparalleled. But more than that, his presentation of each character’s ambitions, worries, fears are presented in fashions no other director could replicate, an artistry as unique as a fingerprint.
Clearly, Upstream Color did not exactly set out to tell a concrete story -- it relishes its elliptical edits, hazy compositions, and vague motivations. It’s confounding, disparate, and disjointed. But beyond the experimental technical execution, Upstream Color simply left me emotionless. Where I wanted a cathartic release of the characters’ journey, I experienced vague flourishes of images. Where I sensed a budding mystery, I got cross-cuts between numerous storylines. The “emotional collage” filmmaking works -- Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and To The Wonder come to mind as ambitious, resounding uses of the fragmented storytelling method -- but it requires an emotional anchor on which the audience can depend. Carruth seems to imitate the anachronistic and temporal narrative distortions of Malick, Lynch, or Godard. But the sci-fi/mystery background of the tale doesn’t quite allow the emotions of the requisite love story to flourish.
At one point, Kris and Jeff are speaking in an apartment and then -- as the audio track continues -- Carruth cuts to the same conversation being held outside, at night, as Kris and Jeff stroll down the road, before looping back to the initial scene. These temporal changes should elicit a sense of memory, a shade of shared dreaming, in their painting of a relationship that is not moored in a specific time or place. Instead, it simply left me with a profound sense of confusion.
But is the point of the film to understand everything? Isn’t there value in leaving certains answers up to the audience? In his review of Malick’s To The Wonder, Roger Ebert questioned the need for filmmakers to supply answers:
Why must a film explain everything? Why must every motivation be spelled out? Aren't many films fundamentally the same film, with only the specifics changed? Aren't many of them telling the same story? Seeking perfection, we see what our dreams and hopes might look like. We realize they come as a gift through no power of our own, and if we lose them, isn't that almost worse than never having had them in the first place?
Ebert enjoyed the fact that such films tell not just the same old story, but tap into some universal themes in new, confounding ways. He seemed to relish a film’s ability to elude logic, transcend categorization. If he were here, I think he would have liked Upstream Color. It’s a film that would rather try to evoke than supply, conjure rather than explain. It may be devoid of logic and emotion in any conventional sense, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have its own sense of logic and emotion within. For all its good and bad, it’s one of the most challenging films in recent memory. And that is an admirable thing.
