Venice 2010: I'm Still Here and Promises Written In Water

Seeing as I'll have a review of it up on the Empire website next week, I don't want to go on too long about Casey Affleck's I'm Still Here (pictured), which purports to be the true story of Joaquin Phoenix's 2008 meltdown, when the star announced that he was abandoning acting and entering the world of rap under the name JP. (He didn't say then that he would also grow a beard, never wash or cut his hair and get really fat too, so that was clearly a bonus.) And on the question of how real or fake it is, I still don't quite know what to say, since Affleck's film didn't really convince me, or anybody else really, that it was a genuine foray into one man's madness, and it's also surprisingly tame, given some of the salacious press that followed its first private screening in the US to potential buyers.

But although it feels heavily stage-managed, I'm Still Here is a genuine oddity that isn't quite the post-modern lark its makers perhaps would like it to be. It's not a comfortable watch, and there's a distinct difference to the stages that Phoenix goes through on his way to becoming JP, from the wired, manic coke fiend of the beginning to the fat, bored zombie of the end. But even if it really is all a stunt, and Phoenix's tantrums and antics – coke, hookers, booze and weed – are all for show, there's a creepy sense this film really taps into something very weird that's going on with him, and that stays in the mind far longer than the genuinely funny stuff or the Borat-style set-pieces.


Talking of weirdness, Vincent Gallo's film Promises Written In Water preceded the Phoenix doc, and, quite astonishingly, the massive Darsena screening room was full for it. Less surprisingly, the seats were a tad emptier by the time it finished, but although the film is clearly very challenging, it has a strangely beautiful aura and is actually rather hard to shake off. As per usual, it is written, produced and edited by the holy trinity of Vincent Gallo, who also stars, and after the relatively commercial Brown Bunny, which actually had characters that talked and did stuff, this is very rigorously arthouse fare, a true throwback to the non-narrative film culture of the 60s.

The story, such as it is, is spare to say the least, and seems to involve a dying woman (Delfine Bafort) who becomes involved with a mortician (Gallo) she hopes will take care of her when she passes. Some of the longer scenes are pure Gallo, with lots of close-ups of the actor and little else, and one in particular really pushed the audience's buttons. It's a scene in which Gallo's character is talking to the woman during a date in a restaurant. We don't see her face, we just see Gallo's, and every so often her hair or nose bobs into the frame. She asks him if he has spoken to “Colette”, his girlfriend. For the next five to ten minutes, Gallo's character tells her has. Colette has gone to Thailand with a 55-year-old man, but she has told him not to worry because she stills loves him, more than any of her other lovers, past and present. Gallo then repeats this information over and over, in different permutations. Needless to say, there was a lot of giggling, but, looking back, the scene has an interesting, dreamlike quality that permeates the movie through to its understated ending, when Gallo films the girl with a 16mm camera, documenting her body with Warholian detachment.

It has been derided as pretentious and, well, just pretentious, but Promises Written In Water is a surreal and even bizarrely moving film with a melancholy atmosphere that's only augmented by the film's diffuse(d?) black-and-white cinematography. After the halfway mark, people began walking out by the dozen, but I think that's their loss; Vincent Gallo may not have a place in mainstream cinema but he does belong in film. Fifty years ago, a film like this would be lauded for its opacity and its focus on mood and emotion; today, it struggles to be even seen, let alone understood.