Ed Stoppard (Roadside Attractions)
Do cow constellations talk to us? Was Lenin the first marketing executive? These are some of the premises behind the Russian-American co-production Branded. Consumerism, the standard of beauty, and corporate crimes all boil down to the power of advertising. While Mad Men celebrates the ancestors of today’s corporate shills, this movie rails against the industry that deceives consumers to convince them to shell out their filthy ducats. And it means it too: the movie has had almost no discernible ad campaign behind it. No advance screenings were offered to critics, and the title wasn’t even listed in publicists’ weekly update of openings. It was the first I had ever heard of the film when I saw it listed. What the hell is this? The questions don’t end when the hard drive stops spinning.
Ed Stoppard stars as Mikhail, a Moscow ad guy hoping to make ad partner with his boss Bob (Jeffrey Tambor). Meanwhile, in a place identified in a caption as a “Private Polynesian Island,” an unnamed Marketing Guru (Max Von Sydow) plots to change the mental fabric of the consumer populace. Meanwhile, MIkhail takes a shine to Bob’s niece Abby (Leelee Sobieski).
I know, it doesn’t sound promising, and it gets worse. The movie is made so strangely that any intelligent message is overwhelmed by cinematic ineptitude. Camera set-ups are awkward, voice-overs start sooner than they should, and a persistent narration has the banal tone and the inflection of a smart-phone giving directions. When a poster of spoons appears in one scene, you suspect that the filmmakers, first timers Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerayn, were competing with Tommy Wiseau’s The Room for Worst Movie Ever Made.
But the movie takes such surreal turns that it’s awfulness become a cinematic train wreck from which you can’t avert your eyes. And then it actually gets interesting. Mid-way through the movie Branded abandons gridlocked Moscow for a countryside populated by black and white cows. When we met Mikhail at the beginning of the movie, we are introduced to him as a little kid who has visions, and here the adult Misha has a vision that he makes real. The movie up to this point has played with body themes that are straight out of David Cronenberg, but what Misha does with his vision brings the movie into a hallucinatory territory that you’d never expect to see in a multiplex. Jodorowsky would be proud.
Branded is a terrible movie. But as it defies the advertising industry in plot as well as in practice, it also defies conventional standards of quality. The curious moviegoer who takes a chance on Branded will not walk out of the theater thinking they’ve seen a masterpiece. You’ll have a lot of questions: how did it get made in the first place? How did this Russian dystopia end up in a multiplex instead of a midnight show at E Street or at Psychotronic? Is it really a front for the Russian mafia? We may never know. But know that you haven’t seen anything quite like it before.
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Directed by Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerayn
Written by Aleksandr Dulerayn and Jamie Bradshaw.
With Ed Stoppard, Leelee Sobieski, Jeffrey Tambor, Max Von Sydow.
Rated R for language, sexual content, and dripping buckets of WTF
Now playing at area multiplexes, but not for long.
