BAMcinemaFest 2017 Film Review: ‘Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone’

“Snowy Bing Bongs Across the North Star Combat Zone” is the kind of film words cannot possibly describe.

Not because it’s bad, or because there’s nothing to say, but doing so feels inadequate. It’s a film that is simultaneously overflowing with ingenuity and talent that is constantly teetering dangerously close to the maligned qualities of what we might call twee, and yet that is only half of it.

But, you should also know, none of this is a surprise. Or at least it shouldn’t be. After all, Snowy Bing Bongs was produced by duo the Daniels, whose 2016 film Swiss Army Man suffered under a similar weight. As it turns out, most people have the same reaction when faced with a film where a (possibly) deranged Paul Dano befriends the flatulent corpse of Daniel Radcliffe and proceeds to stalk Mary Elizabeth Winstead. That reaction is somewhere between visceral disgust, complete bewilderment, and utter joy, both that a film would so willingly forego what we might call “narrative coherence” and that it would so lovingly embrace the entire scope of what movies can do.

Here, directors Alex Huston Fischer and Rachel Walter, along with collaborators Cocoon Central Dance Team (Tallie Medel, Sunita Mani, and Eleanore Pienta), similarly drop the audience into a bizarre and wondrous world. Like Swiss Army Man, which opens with the Dano’s character on track to hang himself, the first scenes of Snowy Bing Bongs are marked by their sheer confidence. The three women, dressed in rugs, like some sort of Paleolithic sheep, face off against a squad of beach balls, dancing slowly. Suddenly they’re sunbathing, before farting in unison.

Fischer and Walter leap from style to style with reckless abandon, and yet the film never spirals out of control. The interludes return us to the attack of the Beach Balls and the three women’s carefully bizarre dance. In between, we see Mani attend an audition in which she spends the whole time trying to pronounce her own name. (The casting director? Keith Poulson, marking his second acting credit this summer.) Pienta is pulled into a potential romance with an old man who informs her she’s the kindest person in the world, so kind in fact that she has two hearts. Medel delivers a backstage monologue that puts anything Iñárritu did in Birdman to shame.

There’s also a stop motion sequence, a montage through an asteroid belt, and a fourth wall breaking denouement in which the lights come up and the Bing Bongs hold a Q&A with an audience, and even Spice Girls-esque dance musical performance.

Yet even if this rapid description of the films plot doesn’t make narrative or logical sense, they make an aesthetic, emotional sense onscreen. Each of the women’s vignettes feels ripped from a real experience. Like Swiss Army Man, which used its over the top style to dig into the complex emotional realities of how we deal with our inner selves and with the rest of the world, here we have a constellation of stories all of which expose Medel, Mani, and Pienta (literally and figuratively) to the audience, three actresses and improv vets whose experiences are given voice in the most absurd way possible. Snowy Bing Bongs says it’s ok to fart, and to stage interpretive dance battles against beach balls. But it also touches on the embarrassment of messing up your own name, or having a weird interaction with a neighbor, or struggling to understand why you want to be an actor. It takes the smallest moments in day to day life and blows them up into immersive tableaus, warts and all. 

So yes, Snowy Bing Bongs is “weird,” or “immature,” in quotation marks, like stumbling on a stranger’s sketchbook brought to life. Yes, many people will probably not like it, and its cuteness and kitchen sink style make easy targets for criticism. And yet.

Snowy Bing Bongs is also upsettingly funny and weirdly stirring. At the very least, it’s a bravado experiment in how two directors, with total control over tone, can set genres against each other and revel in the inevitable sparks. The result is the rare film with an unabashedly, uncynical wonder for the possibilities of cinema, something that needs to be seen to be believed.

We screened the film at BAMcinemaFest 2017.