Ryan J. Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni’s genre-bending debut is a triumph of bootstrapped independent cinema.
There exists a strange but understandable tendency among some filmmaking debutantes to try and hide or elude their influences. Much worse are those who resort to self conscious, grandiose cultural signification in a desperate bid for ironic distance, a conspicuous attempt to acquit themselves of what is an otherwise acceptable and expected practice. The greats will always loom large – and what is storytelling and art if not a chain link of tales told across time, each indebted to the other. It’s a clarifying act to embrace this reality, and every film is better for it. Jim Jarmusch famously echoed as much in his exhortation to “steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your soul…authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.” A great work is always theft, never imitation – theft as an acknowledgment of the world that exists beneath, above, and within the surface, whereas imitation merely skims it.
We’re pleased to report that Ryan J. Sloan’s Gazer is in full command of its filmic forefathers, corralling the likes of Hitchcock, Schrader, and Cronenberg into a sweepingly inventive study of temporal entropy. The debut possesses a winding, almost serpentine breadth of thematic expanse, but the locus of artistic control resides firmly in a place of individualized and authentic vision. Much of this can be credited to the intensity with which Gazer is anchored in its setting, as the film’s noirish overtones find brilliantly authentic form in the muted desolation of industrial New Jersey, a familiar urban face of sorts for the first-time director. An electrician by trade, Sloan sourced many of the film’s locations via solicitation of his clients for use of their apartments and homes. In addition to the scouting perks of his day job, he drew upon a childhood spent in nearby Kearny, a blue collar enclave that abuts Newark and the Passaic River. In a Q&A following Gazer’s screening at the Hamptons International Film Festival, Sloan cited these environs as a kind of topographical influence that not only characterizes the thriller’s harsh physicality but also informs its rough-hewn visual language. Crucially, he also found the ultimate creative match in co-writer and lead actress Ariella Mastroianni, a multi-hyphenate Canadian who partnered with the freshman director to shoot the feature over a period of two and a half years, committing weekends to the project whenever enough cash was on hand. In May, the pair traded views of the Hudson River for that of the Cote D’Azure, with Gazer’s acceptance to Cannes’ prestigious Quinzaine de Cineaste. Metrograph Pictures promptly picked up the film for theatrical release, punctuating a remarkable rise for the indie duo.
The plaudits are well deserved. Mastroianni emanates a hushed freneticism straight from the jump as single mother Frankie, cast out from her young daughter’s life on account of a neurological disorder that distorts her perception of time. Duty of care concerns extend beyond filial relations with the condition degenerating, and fast – rendering struggles with employment, focus, and a healthy relationship with reality. Armed with a tape recorder and a Memento-esque routine of recitation meant to induce a return to focus (“look around you, what do you see?”), Frankie cuts a spectral presence through the dulled serration of New Jersey’s urban hinterlands. The disorder manifests itself in our taciturn protagonist’s ever-drifting, wayward gaze – one that’s inclined towards the furtively dramatic. In an early scene, Frankie catches a glimpse of a domestic assault through an apartment window, an event that catalyzes Gazer’s subsequent narrative delirium. Dialogue is spare and often brooding, scenes of Frankie at her desk conjure the imagery of Paul Schrader, her room marked by an ascetic and rigid austerity. The film itself takes on a meditative quality with its repetition and phantasmagoric elisions – memories and dreams are vehicles for the vibrating staccato of unconscious meaning, delivered in the form of Cronenbergian body horror. Its grain-forward photography and boldness of image create a bridge between tonal oneiric realism in Frankie’s waking life and gestural conceptual drama outside of it. There is an altogether refreshing temerity to Gazer, a vision that uses the confines of genre to simultaneously shrug off its worst instincts and assimilate new territory. Just as importantly, Sloan and Mastroianni’s success has signaled something magnificent – that high quality, shoestring indie cinema still has a great deal of fight left.
