Special: Berlin International Film Festival 2007 | Elvis Presley (2007)0

Terrifyingly unwatch­able, some­what pre­ten­tious, yet a film of heart and pur­pose. The story of Elvis Pelvis is that of a small Jamaican-British fam­ily that is on its down­ward spi­ral towards self-destruction due to their anger and con­fu­sion with their lack of iden­tity in the mod­ern world con­quered by the ever-present entity that is the American media. It is a rel­e­vant and uni­ver­sal story made irrel­e­vant by film­mak­ing that is mired with unfor­giv­able flaws which include unrea­son­ably slow pac­ing and muddy-looking cin­e­matog­ra­phy among oth­ers. But is this a film that is still worth seeing? The film is divided into two seg­ments, the open­ing seg­ment being “The Suit”, and the sec­ond being “The Messiah”. In “The Suit”, the char­ac­ter of Elvis is a boy who is con­stantly forced by his father to dress and behave like Elvis Presley, his father’s idol. He suf­fers pun­ish­ment from the hands of his father if he rebels against his daily makeover while his mother, a heroin addict, plainly looks on. Yet, in some moments, a ten­der­ness shines through when they are together, as we realise that despite their destruc­tive natures, they still love each other. Then comes Elvis’ birth­day where he receives an Elvis Presley suit and wig. Elvis, hav­ing had enough of hav­ing to have to please his father’s irra­tional desire of cre­at­ing him in the image of his hero, destroys the cos­tume. His furi­ous father then whips him with his belt until Elvis decides to fight back, acci­den­tally killing his father in the process. In “The Messiah”, Elvis has grown up, though his name has been changed to “Derek”. In this seg­ment of the film, Derek befriends a sui­ci­dal, cancer-stricken old man. Their rela­tion­ship is rather strange as Derek decides to take on the role of the old man’s estranged son, Jimi, who in a mat­ter of coin­ci­dence, was named after Derek’s own child­hood hero, Jimi Hendrix. Why I like the story is prob­a­bly because I relate to it so well and it deal with issues that I’ve always been fas­ci­nated with. Does one’s cul­ture seize to exist in the world any­more because of how the dom­i­nat­ing power of American com­mer­cial­ism and indus­tri­al­ism has taken over the world? Is a per­son not them­selves if they take on the iden­tity of another? Is the influ­ence of one’s par­ents dur­ing child­hood irre­versible? This film, at least in terms of story struc­ture, han­dles these issues well enough to prove to be though-provoking and chal­leng­ing rather than bor­ing. I sup­pose my dis­like for the film lies in the fact that I wish a more well-made film was made about these issues. The film is about peo­ple strug­gling to find their iden­tity within a world that tries to force them into becom­ing some­thing that they don’t want to be yet at the same time being obsessed with becom­ing some­body that they admire, of which in this film both are cul­tural American fig­ures. But even this sim­ple tale will prob­a­bly be impen­e­tra­ble to even the most atten­tive of audi­ences because of the lack of stim­u­lat­ing film­mak­ing. This film is a prime exam­ple of how a good story can­not do with­out the exper­tise of pro­fes­sional film­mak­ers. The image qual­ity is so ter­ri­ble that I was sur­prised to dis­cover that the film was actu­ally shot on Super 16mm film as it looks like it was shot on an old Handicam because of the incred­i­bly grainy images. Besides the qual­ity of the images, many shots in this film were out of focus. The edit­ing of the film is sloppy and super­fi­cial, with dozens of scenes resort­ing to cut­ting to black to tran­si­tion from scene to scene and extended sequences of minute actions. How many vari­a­tions of shots do you need to show a man walk­ing to a table to eat a bowl of cereal? Why are we con­stantly hav­ing to have to see redun­dant scenes where the char­ac­ter is not doing any­thing ter­ri­bly impor­tant to the story. Do we really need to see Elvis’ father uri­nat­ing into a sink before mas­tur­bat­ing into it at the heat of the moment? Why were these scenes even shot in the first place? And did the split screen tech­nique really have to be employed dur­ing cer­tain scenes. It seems that when this tech­nique is utilised in the film, the two images do not seem to share a con­nec­tion. At most, they only com­ple­ment each other in the most super­fi­cial of ways and are some­times even unin­ten­tion­ally funny. This film was made over a period of four and a half years with the pro­duc­tion being funded by money the direc­tor and his wife per­son­ally raised. After the first year or so, their money ran out, with not a sin­gle cent to their name. This was obvi­ously a film made with great pas­sion and deter­mi­na­tion and it is a pity that their film can­not be made more pre­sentable to a wider audi­ence out­side of lim­ited screen­ings at film festivals.