Directed
by Crystal Moselle, Starring: Bhagavan, Mukunda, Narayana and Govinda Angulo,
Glen Hughes and Eddie Vaughan Reisenbichler. Documentary, US, 2015, 90mins, Cert 15.
This
multi-award winning documentary explores the true story of a family of six
brothers who were effectively quarantined from the outside world in a high-rise
apartment on the Lower East Side of New York throughout their formative years.
Homeschooled by their mother, the boys, (together with a seventh sibling, a
sister who is largely ignored in the film), were essentially kept under a kind
of social/religious house arrest by their father. “Our dad was the only one
that had the keys to the front door”.
So
fearful was their father of the outside world - mum appears to have only been
allowed out for essential medical appointments - the boys themselves rarely got
to leave the confines of their cramped living quarters: “Sometimes we’d go out
once a year...and one particular year we never got out at all.”
Their
‘escape’ from this imprisonment came in the form of films, VHS and DVD’s which
they watched voraciously, and then staged elaborate enactments (à la BE
KIND REWIND) in their apartment using handmade props from their domestic
resources such as cereal boxes. They were so meticulous in their preparations
that the scripts were hand typed on a traditional manual typewriter. We see
footage from various stagings, notably their interpretation of RESERVOIR DOGS –
played out line-perfect in black and white suits (but minus the blood). Their
attention to detail with their cardboard guns and weapons on one occasion resulted
in a SWAT team storming the home to search for what was reported to be genuine
fire-arms. How’s that for a backhanded compliment for their efforts at
authenticity!
Some
of the background details are sketchy, the timeline is never made clear for
example, and often the ingrained timecodings on the snatches of degraded home
VHS footage provide the only clues in amongst the miss-tracking and visual
snow. There is a suggestion of domestic violence when one of the brothers (it’s
never made clear who is who on camera) recalls that arguments between his
parents often resulted in his mother being slapped behind a closed door. Oscar,
the father, obviously reluctant to appear on camera, doesn’t show up on screen for
over half the running time (at one point I wondered whether he’d actually
left). The boy’s mother Susanne, whilst more forthcoming, is obviously wary of
the father’s presence during the filming and appears (understandably) reticent
about revealing too much about her own experiences.
It’s
ironic therefore that considering the father’s pathological fear of the outside
world’s influence on his off-spring he doesn’t appear to have censured in
anyway their viewing habits and the films that they were watching so avidly.
The trigger for rebellion appears to have been a viewing of THE DARK KNIGHT
which seemed to jolt the oldest sibling into escaping from his own erm, bat
cave (?) in January 2010 by putting on a cardboard ‘Michael Myers’ mask and
going for a stroll down to the local stores. This eventually resulted in him
being arrested and referred for counselling.
But
despite this temporary setback, as adolescence loomed, the ‘wolfpack’ seemed to
hear their own individual calls of the wild. Footage of the boys on the beach
at Coney Island hesitantly dipping their toes in the seawater before taking the
plunge reminded me of YouTube footage of caged animals being released from
laboratory testing and seeing grass and sunshine for the first time. In fact
this analogy is not that far from the truth.
The
film is a testament both to the internal capacity for emotional resilience and
also to the power of movie escapism. It’s an intriguing glimpse into a scenario
that seems barely conceivable in this day and age, and one that could have had potentially
tragic consequences had it not been for Batman.
***(out of 5*)
Paul Worts
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