Tribeca Film Festival 2023: HE WENT THAT WAY & DEAD GIRLS DANCING

Two films I watched at Tribeca this week share a lot of DNA: He Went That Way and Dead Girls Dancing could be seen as a double feature, His and Hers queer road trip movies that explore self-creation through violence, lies, and self indulgence. While both have juicy premises, promising intrigue, danger, adventure, and a little bit of sex appeal (one comic and kinky, the other youthful and steamy), both struggle to realize these thematic goals. The road movie, particularly the queer road movie, from The Living End to Y Tu Mamá También to Happy Together, promises freedom from social ostracization, a space to live authentically without fear – if only for a little while. In so doing, they explore that dangerous, intoxicating form of liminal liberation Hunter S. Thompson calls “The Edge.” In both of these films, edge is what’s fundamentally lacking. 

He Went That Way (Jeffrey Darling)

If you can train a chimpanzee to play the piano, how hard can teaching a killer kindness really be? He Went That Way, directed by the late Jeffrey Darling who passed away in a surfing accident soon after principal photography was completed, strikes out on Highway 66 to tell the fictionalized true story of a strange encounter between an animal trainer and a serial killer. It’s 1964, the age of highway outlaws of all stripes. Midway through a journey to Chicago, Jim (Zachary Quinto, Star Trek, American Horror Story) happens across Bobby (Jacob Elordi, Euphoria, The Kissing Booth), a handsome young man in need of a ride, and eagerly offers him the passenger seat. Bobby, we already know, is on a journey of his own, a debauched killing spree that spans several states and has seemingly spared none of his vehicular benefactors. Jim, too, is already in a spot of trouble: Spanky, his famous pet chimpanzee and meal ticket, isn’t getting gigs like he used to. This income drop has put a strain on his marriage (chimpanzees don’t have health insurance), and if he doesn’t make it to Chicago, his wife will leave him. Now, Jim finds himself a hostage in his own car, and Bobby’s mercurial presence threatens first this gig, then his marriage, then his life. To survive the trip, Jim must earn the younger man’s friendship however he can. 

A quirky, eye-catching premise like this one would seem almost guaranteed to bring some excitement. Yet, like Jim’s broken down old wagon whose engine stalls just in time for his meet-cute with our sexy killer, the film sputters along where it should hum with danger, threatening to give out under the strain of the miles between California and Illinois. Quinto brings a steady benevolence to his role that compliments Elordi‘s juvenile twitchiness, and their chemistry keeps the film running, but the script gives both men too little dimension, bypassing nuance in favor of light schmaltz. Bobby, it turns out, really just needs love. Jim, who treats Bobby’s bursts of violence like an exasperated father might treat a child’s tantrums, uses Spanky (the chimp) as a proxy to demonstrate the importance of gentleness and respect in romantic relationships – and as a literal tool to pick up women (an actual line from Elordi: “Spanky the chimp, more like Spanky the pimp!”). This lesson – essentially, “giving a chimpanzee an apple is pretty much the same as picking up a woman without attacking her” – is more than a little half-baked. Still, there’s a genuine sexual tension between the two leads that occasionally shines through, queering the story and softening the insult inherent in this clumsy comparison. 

The film’s real downfall, though, beyond its laconic pacing, is that these dynamics are treated with an almost prudish distance. That the two men are attracted to each other isn’t really in question, and one scene in a motel room when their dates are asleep strikes a genuinely effective note of transgression and danger that should have been developed further. The film’s style as well as its substance don’t quite deliver the playful ’60s aesthetic or idiosyncratic, Coen brothers zest that seem to have been the goal: As the credits roll, the real Jim, Dave Pitts, appears in archival footage to tell his story in his own words, and his succinct, direct-to-camera retelling is more vivacious, funny, and intriguing than the entire film preceding it. Yet, even if it’s no Thelma & Louise, the premise alone is still inherently exciting enough to hang pretty good time on. Who doesn’t like a chimp on ice skates? 

Dead Girls Dancing (Anna Roller)

Dead Girls Dancing is the kind of film whose charms are best served by tumblr gifsets. Transpose Spring Breakers onto an ambient, slow-moving European art film and it would look a lot like this, but, as in He Went That Way, the danger – and, just as importantly, the sex – is missing, rendering this film dead on arrival. The film is a coming-of-age tale that follows three German girls (Luna Jordan, Noemi Liv Nicolaisen, and Katharina Stark) fresh out of high school on a road trip in Italy before the responsibilities of adulthood set in, shot like Justine Kirkland‘s “Girl Pictures” come to life. The premise, technically, is that when they meet up with a young Italian woman (Sara Giannelli) and stumble across an abandoned village together, their wild sides are let loose and, to quote the Tribeca description, “the quartet starts to experiment with the limits of their newly found freedom, away from the expectations of their parents and teachers.” 

Like He Went That Way, I chose this film because its premise has a fun, sweaty, surreal tinge to it. But this description just isn’t accurate to Dead Girls Dancing. The endless slumber-party Neverland promised here takes up startlingly little of the film’s runtime, and none of those feelings are allowed to come through. Taking this synopsis at its word, it seems freedom here stops somewhere around stealing beer from a liquor store when no one’s around to care. Similarly, the same strange prudishness that hinders Darling‘s film positively kneecaps this one (lesbians thinking that this movie will pick up where Foxfire left off–– think again). The film also lacks any sense of structure, sleepwalking from aesthetic shots of tangled limbs to intimate, soft closeups of dirty socks or plumes of smoke from the infinite cigarettes the girls smoke, without regard for cohesion, plot, or even, seemingly, fun. 

A film doesn’t always need to be traditionally structured to work (many of the best aren’t), nor does it necessarily need “characters” with “fully fleshed backstories” to feel meaningful. Yet Dead Girls Dancing is so thin as to feel more like a music video, a short story pushed far past its appropriate length, or a high schooler’s prose poem than it does a feature film. There are plenty of movies about beautiful young women in beautiful locations behaving badly, experiencing ennui and their bodies for the first time–– a genre that meant a lot to me growing up, and still does–– American Honey or The Virgin Suicides, Times Square or Daisies, Mustang or Heavenly Creatures to name just a few. Most of them do a better job making meaning out of the violent, tragic, sexy, delicious, confusing, nihilistic paradoxes of being a young woman, or at least serve as vehicles for electric performances from their young actresses. There’s none of that here, for all of its gestures towards existentialism. Instead, we get a resounding emptiness, the cinematic equivalent of a blank stare, even as the imagery takes on the mantle of a beloved and familiar genre. Dead Girls Dancing left its (mostly female) audience on Friday restless, dashing to the bathroom and checking their phones. A woman in my row ordered a Lyft twenty minutes before the credits rolled. Would that I could have done the same.