Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, which is deliberately muffled and dislocated, is almost promiscuously allusive. When it decides, on a whim, to be in the "normal" world, it's jarring because one becomes accustomed to the dislocation; there are very few moments when someone's lips are mouthing the dialogue we hear, and what we hear is indistinct. At one point, when the heroine is bobbing up and down in a pool, murmuring at intervals, the hero asks her what she's saying. It seems almost an inside joke--and then we realize she's reciting Walden, which her captor (who hypnotized her with worms harvested from orchids) was leafing through early on. Her captor says he cannot be looked at because he's made of the same material as the sun. This movie can't be looked at head-on, or else its own spell is broken. But its aural-visual-rhythmic flow has its magic.
After her captor (called the "Thief") extorts money from her--which seems a peculiarly earthbound motive--and leaves her alone with a pinhead, infantilized mind and worms coursing through her body, the heroine instinctively treks into the wilderness where a balding man--the "Sampler"--saves her, possibly by transplanting flesh from a living pig. The pig, tagged with her name, is released to a farm; the Sampler is a pig farmer, surgeon, and sound man. He seems to care for his livestock, but is impatient when they act out; a few end up in a sack in the river, where they secrete the blue color of the wormy orchids. The Sampler also peers invisibly over the shoulder of random people--presumably they've been tagged, too--and mixes sounds such as those of streams running or stones sliding down drainage tunnels. The pigs are clearly doubles of the people, who can hear the sounds he records--he has his own label--at home, and are drawn to him like baseball players to the Field of Dreams. There's other doubling: The Sampler throws the sheet music that, one assumes, he cannot replicate with his nature recordings into the water, and the hero does the same with office paperwork at the hotel he works at, for reasons unknown. When the couple puts the Sampler out of his misery, and take ownership of the pig farm--mailing out copies of Walden to their fellow survivors--they are clearly taking back their own lives, and going back to nature. It's fascinating to read the Sampler as a sort of non-omnipotent God, a benign caretaker who observes his flock rather helplessly. The cycle is broken; those larval worms (the first stage of life) can no longer be harvested by older-looking versions of kids we saw in the beginning with the Thief, popping the worms like drugs.
When the people talk about their personal lives, it's like watching a movie within a movie. Carruth shows some talent for a more domestic piece about two survivors of trauma finding each other and finding love when the hero hides the heroine's prescription bottles with a menu at a cafe. But the film isn't tethered to their "story," which is about as grounded as a series of flashbacks would be: the B story to another movie's A story. But this gives Upstream Color a dreamy texture. What doesn't is the Malicky running of hands across surfaces, a celebration of the sensory which has no more meaning than the impulse a child has to touch all the artwork at a museum. And there's (probably a lot) that doesn't add up, such as why the hero and heroine's childhood memories are intertwined. But I'm glad there's mystery; it balances out the obviousness in the homages to Walden, which themselves give a contemporary meaning and narrative propulsion not normally found in films this abstract. It's about finding one's baseline in nature and love.
