INVENTION (Calllie Hernandez 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

CALLIE HERNANDEZ IN INVENTIION

CALLIE HERNANDEZ, COURTNEY STEPHENS: INVENTION (2024)

The body electric

TRAILER

Upon an oddball dad's death he leaves his daughter the patent for an electro-magnetic healing device.

Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens had bonded over filmmaking and lost fathers. They co-wrote this compact, minimal documentary-fiction hybrid with Callie starring and Courtney directing. It was filmed in the Berkshires among the lakes in beautiful summer weather, so if the film's storyline leaves you unmoved you may enjoy the scenery. They've woven something together here, a meditation on mourning and memory that touches on magic and illusion in the way that a super-indie film, forged out of bits and pieces in garages and rooms, can create fantasy better by not having the means to build off-puttingly fancy, hi-tech illusions. This is a little like what Shane Carruth's 2004 time travel movie Primer did, only this time the inventor is absent. A lot is left out; the viewer has to fill in, as the bereived must make up for being deprived of the loved one. It has been a hit with festival audiences, but it's pace is a little too sluggish and its focus too offbeat for any mainstream audience. Like Primer, it may be more fun to puzzle over and talk about than to watch.

Callie, known here as Carrie Fernandez (people's names are at least slightly changed here, like everything else) did have a father who died in 2021 of a COVID-related illness, who when alive made TV appearances acting as a telemarketer for new age healing methods. (The two focuses he touts for them are reducing stress and losing weight.) Real VHS footage of those TV appearances weaves through the fictionalized story.

The executor-estate lawyer (New York indie writer-filmmaker James N. Keinitz Wilkins) informs Carrie about the will, including her dad's very diicey finances and multiple identities. The patent he has left her in a trust has been recalled by the FDA so it is currently "in legal limbo." He asks what the "doctor" (he was so called) actually was into, if he wsn't into kids, and they apparently were estranged and he didn't know her well. "Barnes & Noble," Carrie says. "Sharper Image. Gadgets. He grew up Jehovah's Witness, then Pentecostal, and then became a doctor, and then got into Chinese medecine and then reiki, and then flower essences and um, energy. Yeah, you kind of had to buy into whatever he was into at the moment or it wasn't really a connection. Then later on he was into lasers. And then conspiracy. And then he went bankrupt, and then went into working for a pyramid scheme in Utah selling laser healing frequency machines and working on feral cats."

"Did you believe in that?" the executor asks. "Not really," Carrie says.

Eventually ideas about conspiracies come in for more and more mention, though not feral cats. But as Rory O'Connor puts it in his review for The Film Stage, what this film is mainly trying to do with its fictionalized personal history is "to explore the ways we process death," though the filmmakers "go one further, suggesting an alternative timeline" where the dead father leaves his daughter this multi-colored tube and metal device - we keep glimpsing it, along with a burning candle - that looks like a tiny, delicate chandelier. In constructing their story, Hernandez and Stephens have created a mix that, perhaps intentionally, may seem as inexplicable and fragile as dad's contrapion, and his reputation. Grieving and death are great, fragile mysteries that with their docufiction hybrid Callie and Courtney seek to approach; but this man was a mystery already.

Carrie goes through a testing ground of different people, each of whom she is the first to inform, usually quite bluntly, of her father's death. An antique dealer (Tony Torn) says everybody lost money on this invention, and that he himself has no skiklls to help promote it now. Looking for specs for its prototype, Carrie visits a local, Christian, workshop where some of the electro-magnetic healing devices were originally manufactured, 50 of them, whereupon her father "ghosted" them, the owner (indie fiilmmaker Joe Swanberg) says. Pitying her, he asks her if she is Christian and,, I though she says no, still invites her to kneel on the flloor with him while he prays for her, and she does. The message, I guess, is that when we are bereaved, we must take whatever help we are offered., and we may compromise. The man on the lake asks "Are you OK?" and Carrie says "No." She has had to put up with the unxious, icky funeral director (Nicholas J. Facci). (The kitsch funeral home is the most authentic-seeming moment of the movie's fictions.)

Carrie finds a man doing tai chi barefoot outdoors who lives in a beautiful house on a lake. He expresses annoyance with her father for whom, he says, he could have found venture capitalists in Silicon Valley to invest in the electroic healing device, but her dad, always suspicious, went for smaller local people he thinks were untrustworthy. He and Carrie smoke pot looking over the lake while he extols the virtues of Walden. Will she stay for dinner? "No," she says, without even a "thank you." Her manner is stoney and blunt throught these encounters. There are others. Sham (Sahm McGlynn), a failed standup comic and bearded returnee to the town who now works in the antique shop, sleeps with her. His failed non-jokes crack her up.

Invention constructs a strange fiction around louche fact, but finally the grieving comes when Carrie returns to the tall, ample antique dealer and bursts into tears. She returns to the executor too, and says she wants after all to accept the patent. This may seem a sad and feeble gusture, even a fiction, going against her initial stonewallling and rejection of everything. But as a desperate groping for what's gone, and perhaps was never there, and a very dry joke, it all makes sense, though the menntion of Whitman (whose "body elecdtric" someone sees as anticipating eledctromagnetic healing) makes one long for so much warmth and naturalness that is not there in this world of suspicion, deception, and loss.

Josh Slater-Williams in his review for IndieWire lists clever self conscious techniques of this film, such as its use of Super-16mm film and its cracking of the fourth wall, revealing a considerable degree of self-consciousness in construction. Invention has ddrawn special attention at festivals for the way it tests the boundaries between metafiction and explicit documentary. But Devika Gerish says something more important in concluding her Film Comment remarks: that in the end Carrie's (and Callie's) "father will always be her father, no matter his integrity or sanity, and the illusion of choice when you really have none is a cruel mirage." When your father dies, you must work our your relationship with him for yourself, but you can't change anythng. The late-night informercial TV huckster is there, in the videotapes, defying interpretation and resisting sympathy.

Invention,, 72 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 11, 2024, winning the Pardo d'oro Cineasti del presente performance award. It showed also at Thessaloniki, Belfort, Montreal DocFest, Unknown Pleasures #15, Luxembourg , LA Festival of Movies, New Directors/New Films, and a dozen other festivals. It releases theatrically in the US Apr. 18, 2025 (Metrograph, NYC). Metacritic rating: 67%.