CANADIAN PREMIERE

“Original, innovative and often witty …” New York Film Center

Pure eye and ear candy—put together the island of Sardinia, Vincent Gallo as a Warholian superstar sheriff and drug pusher, an androgynous idiot savant/club kid who comes ashore adorned in rave garb (track suit and iPod), a Vitalic full court soundsystem soundtrack and the droll, mannered work of the über-talented Davide Manuli and you get one of the year’s most enjoyable and enigmatic works.

Shot in widescreen black-and-white, Manuli mixes tropes from desert westerns, Jodorowsky and Buñuelian slapstick surrealism, Antonioni and Roeg-esque speculative sci-fi (cf.: The Man Who Fell to Earth or Eclipse) and all the best trappings of Buster Keaton and William Burroughs to update the legend of the boy (here played by a girl, Silvia Calderoni) known as Kaspar Hauser. Nuremberg 1828 becomes Italy at an indeterminate time, and the sheriff, convinced the spaced-out arrival is the second coming of the Messiah (or master race?) has to contend with the powers that be, a dutchess (the gorgeous Claudia Gerini) who feels the heat and wants him silenced. A parable for our time, and Gallo’s devotion to the enterprise in his dual showdown roles never wavers. Beam me up, Everyman! — Madeleine Molyneaux