Recently I got invited to see this new movie called FUCK MY SON!. It’s a disgusting x-rated comedy based on a Johnny Ryan comic, meant as a theatrical experience, they’re road-showing a 35mm print around and it was in Seattle on Friday and Saturday. Beforehand I looked at writer/director Todd Rohal’s filmography and noticed two titles I’d been vaguely aware of for many years. I really had no idea what they were about, just that somebody some time told me they were good. I decided to watch those and review them before the new one, so today we’ll be discussing Rohal’s 2006 debut THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE. It’s the very definition of a “not for everyone” movie, though in an entirely different way than FUCK MY SON!. But I liked it, so I’ll tell you about it in case you’re not everyone.

There is a Guatemalan character in the movie, but I couldn’t tell you what the title means. Other aspects I could describe but not explain. It’s a very odd, absurd but dry comedy (arguably dramedy?) about a group of interconnected characters going on with life after the simultaneous disappearances of a guy named Donald (Will Oldham, WENDY AND LUCY, JACKASS 3D, THE BIKERIDERS), his dad’s goofy electric car, and an old lady’s dog.

The story is narrated by a little girl named Turkeylegs (Katy Haywood), who describes thirty-something Donald as her best friend. She attends a very small summer camp run by his father Mr. Turnupseed (Ken Byrnes), who “invented a sport that mixes baseball and wrestling, but he’s never told anyone how to play it.” He’s kind of an asshole and seems to have made Donald run away by letting his friends repeatedly make fun of Donald’s chubby baptism photos.

The other main character is Sadie, Donald’s girlfriend who “fell in love with him the first time she saw him” even though “his hand was stuck in a toilet and he was shouting for help.” She’s obviously sad about Donald being gone and comes to stay with Mr. Turnupseed after a falling out with her dad, a Guatemalan demolition derby champ (played by an actor I can’t credit because I can’t for the life of me figure out what the character’s name is).

We also spend some time with the bereft dog owner Ethel Firecracker (Kathleen Kennedy, not the Lucasfilm one), a lovelorn manchild named Stool (Rich Schreiber), and a tangential, black-and-white flashback about a daredevil named Spank Williams (Cory McAbee, THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT). There’s a rollerskating rink and a turtle motif, Emily makes dinner out of chocolate syrup and a chocolate Easter bunny, Ethel longingly creates a mosaic out of dog food.

And yes, there’s a whole thread about this distinctly twee car going through the hands of various owners:

Occasionally there can be a stylistic departure such as the black-and-white scene where Donald and Sadie sing a sweet duet. (If you’re not familiar, Oldham is well known as a singer under the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy.) More unusually there’s a little part with what seems to be actual documentary interviews. There’s a police chief and either they found quite a character there or I was tricked by a really funny acting performance because I honestly suspect they interviewed a real cop and edited in the shots of Emily to make it seem like a conversation.

Although the story is intentionally meandering and contemplative, it does culminate in a demolition derby, which is a pretty good way to add excitement. It reminded me a little bit of STEEL ARENA, but maybe that’s the only other demolition derby movie I’ve seen.

Knowing what Rohal’s new movie is makes me think there could be some influence from the world of underground comics here, or at least some overlapping sensibilities. What I’ve described so far probly sounds more like NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, released two years earlier, but believe it or not it’s not aggressively quirky like that. It’s really not the tone you would expect. It’s got these silly cartoonish elements but the feel of the movie is arty and meditative. At first I thought of RUBIN & ED and the other films by Trent Harris, but it’s in between that and early David Gordon Green movies like GEORGE WASHINGTON. That makes sense because they share composer David Wingo (full disclosure: I knew him back then and he was the one who told me about this movie). But it’s that style mixed with a bit of John Waters outsider art outrageousness and a very specific, idiosyncratic attention to detail.

For example, Ethel spends most of the movie hanging up xeroxed flyers of her missing bichon frise. They’re handwritten and say:

Missing Dog:

Louis the 3rd (III)

“REWARD”

I really appreciate the over-explaining of “the 3rd” and the gratuitous quotation marks on “REWARD.” It’s like a child or our current president made the flyer. I imagine them amusing themselves with it when they made the prop, knowing it’s just a detail of the world and not presented on screen as a gag necessarily. Similarly, when Ethel finds her own funeral notice in the newspaper the article mentions that she “died of complications.”

A scene that’s pretty representative of the tone overall is the introduction of Sadie. Her dad sees her at a pay phone while driving her many little sisters around in a shortbus, so he gets out and yells at her that she’s following him. While the girls practice their batons and karate in the background Dad waves around his derby trophies and medals and yells “You look like a puppy with no face, crying for food it cannot eat.” Neither actor plays it for comedy, and for me Sadie’s hurt feelings register more than the absurdity of the situation.

Another example is the scene where Mr. Turnupseed goes to a diner and there’s no staff there, just Ethel, who explains that they ran out of food because she bought the special, which is a huge feast spread out in front of her. She can’t finish it herself so she invites him to join her and he listens to her talk about her grief while he packs up a bunch of food to take. It’s all dream logic and he’s a terrible person to seek emotional support from but for a moment she seems to benefit from this bare minimum of human contact, and that feels like the emphasis of the scene.

There are many parts that did make me laugh, and I think the very act of taking this crazy shit seriously is itself a joke. But overall it feels to me like it respects the emotions of these ridiculous characters and that ends up being the takeaway. I’m sure many would describe that as “not being very funny,” but I think this tone makes THE GUATEMALAN HANDSHAKE something more unusual than a laugh-generator. These days more than ever I’m thankful for strange things somebody made that nobody else would’ve.