DREAM TEAM (Lev Kalman, Whitney Horn 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

LEV KALMAN, WHITNEY HORN: DREAM TEAM (2024)

Mexican Interpol murder investigation is a zany riff on '90's cable TV inspiring walkouts and yawns

According to Filmmaker Magazine, what Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn make is "genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables." But they lean on aesthetics over content, even winding up being deliberately "dull" or "bad," holding shots, for example, each time a little longer than required, or focusing on scenery in each shot rather than on action or story. Dream Team is inspired by ’90s basic cable TV thrillers, but is shot in their typically textured, color-rich 16mm. The episodic, broken narrative of what Kalman in the Filmmaker interview calls a "weird sexy detective story," involves two Interpol agents, No and Chase (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) traveling in Mexico to investigate a coral smuggler's unexplained death. The lack of separation between sequences in the film is inspired by the rhythm of '90s basic cable dayTV series binge-watching.

To borrow from William Repass's jucier Slant description of the film, No and Chase are "as feckless as they are sexy," as they investigate "a spate of surreal murders in Mexico." The murder weapon, perhaps even the primary suspect, is a coral that "emits a roseate, venomous gas."

The investigators (Repass continues) seem "disciples" of Twin Peaks' Agent Cooper, and accordingly their "soft-boiled" detection methods are "a combination of dream analysis, meditation, hitting the gym, getting seduced by their informants, and pondering the nature of consciousness." I.e., whatever. Title and even credits recur "gratuitously" onscreen, to indicate TV segments and "nonexistent commercial breaks."

The film's "segmentation" allows for a "collaging of disparate genres," also "channel surfing" between "New Age crime procedural, burlesque melodrama, Jacques Cousteau-style oceanography documentary, reggaeton music video, and, most incongruously, aerobics show."Kalman and Horn are more interested in editing and cinematography than in plot or character and the latter are consciously inane": hence the difficulty for audiences of finding anything to appreciate in normal terms; hence the Dream Team festival walkouts. The plot outline, Filmmaker's attribution of "sociopolitical parables" notwithstanding, is more than anything else a pretext for (we keep coming back to this) exercises in style and aesthetics, and playing about with locations.

For some few, the filmmakers' emphasis on aestheticism, illogic and disconnection (inherent in the pseudo cable TV format) may be cool and stylish. But the Letterboxd page on the film from a festival screening reports numerous and rapid walkouts; viewers who stayed describe the film as "atrocious" and a "stoner slog" and winner of the title of "worst film of the (Melbourne) festival," "like the very worst kind of performance art piece, portending to have deeper meaning, that exists only as an inside joke for the friends of its narcissistic creator[s], but unwittingly unleashed upon the unsuspecting general public" and even worse, another Letterboxd contributor thought, than a clumsily made local film about organ donors. Avi Offer calls Dream Team "a zany and elliptical, but painfully dull experimental film."

Kalman and Horn are catering to very special tastes - primarily their own. Horn says in the Filmmaker interview they are "very much not part of the scene," i.e., of any scene. This and also the fact that they still need to have day jobs and are very much learning the craft as they go along, tends to limit the appeal of the product. The filmmakers now being separately based in San Francisco and San Diego, Dream Team was shot largely in San Diego but is set in Mexico and Canada. It took four years to make, mainly because they could only raise the funds to shoot by fits and starts. But that their experimental style appeals to come cinephiles is indicated by the reason for this review: a series of Kalman and Horn's five-film output, a short and three features made between 2006 and this year, presented at the Metrograph, NYC.

Dream Team, 90 mins., debuted Jan. 29, 2024 at Rotterdam, showing also at Los Angeles, Wrocław, Melbourne, and Vancouver. It will show Nov. 15, 2024 at the Metrograph in New York as part of a retrospective, "Retro-Futurism: The Films of Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn."