I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.
Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.
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Even before its premiere, the debates over Mary Bronstein’s Yeast already began to simmer. The film intentionally dispenses with any sense of likability, crafting characters that are an embodiment of distasteful id rather than sympathetic figures to whom the viewer can relate. Karina talked with Bronstein and co-stars Greta Gerwig and Amy Judd about dissolving friendships, movies that don’t make you feel good, and cock punches.
Don’t miss Karina’s review of the film here.
SXSW news, reviews, interviews and discussions
Yeast Interview
Karina Longworth: Mary, last night you were saying that you didn’t make this movie for everybody, and I kind of want to know, who do you think that the audience for this movie is?
Mary Bronstein: Well, when I said that I didn’t make the movie for everybody, I guess, you can only really make movies for people that have similar tastes as yours. What I like to see in a movie is something challenging. I like to go to the movie theater to have some sort of reaction, whether it be something that’s confronting me, some kind of material that is confronting me or challenging me in some way or making me feel something.
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Is Yeast a movie, or a dare? Its official synopsis contains this brag about director Mary Bronstein’s level of experience: “Conceived and made by an actor with no concept of the language of filmmaking, takes traditional dramatic structure and throws it out of the window to be swept away by the street cleaners.” It’s less a pre-emptive defense than a come on, a tease designed to seduce a certain kind of audience into stepping up to the plate. But it’s not pure provocation. Even fans of Frownland (which Bronstein starred in under the direction of her husband Ronald) may not be ready for Yeast’s full-on assault on the senses. This is a film that not only seeks to dodge the audience’s comfort zone, but it actually, actively mocks it. It’s not just abrasive; it’s restless, punishing, totally juvenile in its humor and indifferent to narrative flow or niceties of image. It appears to offers moments of genuine redemption or closure, and then undermines those moments with prankish punchlines. It is resolutely indelicate, and often absurd. It’s a nasty little stink bomb of a film that’s going to instigate a fierce tug of war between supporters and detractors––if it doesn’t completely clear the room. I think it’s a laugh riot and a must-see. Consider yourself warned.
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