Upstate Story (Rose, 2018) is about a man called Ellis Martin who works for one of those wet dream cleaning services ferried out, now and then, to the wealthier suburbs of North America. He is disconnected from his colleagues and spends his Sunday nights getting drunk in the confines of his featureless apartment. The only relief he has from this nine-to-five drudgery is when his two young children stay with him on the weekend, the only worthwhile remnants of his evidently turbulent and recently deceased marriage.
The majority of the film is shot in black and white, and, audibly, features little more than voiceovers from Ellis, the occasional piece of music, and how Ellis hears his colleagues, that is, a brief moment where the viewer is transported to the classroom in the Peanuts cartoon (‘Wah-wa-wah…!’). But we are not stuck in Ellis’s head, so much as stuck in his immediate perception of his environment, which is cold, sanitarily dirty and humourless. There is some humour, however, in the main characters musings that, sometimes, prove to be more melodramatic and/or “wordy” than the screenwriters might have intended.
At 1 hour and 5 minutes, it’s a kind of brisk slog, a running slug of a film—But director Shaun Rose gets away with it because that’s the point he’s trying to make and the story he’s decided to tell. When one considers these (very practical, I think) points, one soon realizes how effective Upstate Story is as a piece of filmmaking. I recently watched Jack Curtis’s The Flesh Eaters (1964), one of the first “gore-films” that was made on a notoriously low budget. The absence of money on the screen is evident when you see how the entire film is set either in the Nazi-sympathizer’s tent, or on the beach. But Curtis, again, gets away with it because of how he decides to shoot his film. It uses a lot of “deep focus” filming, which establishes the paranoid and lonely mood of the movie and is, for the most part, successful. Rose, contrastingly, doesn’t use any fancy filming in Upstate Story; no “deep focus”, no gore – there isn’t a dolly shot in sight (literally…). That said, he succeeds where a lot of films with higher budgets fail: it has a unique cinematic grammar and/or style and succeeds in telling its story.
The opening sequence illustrating what Ellis Martin’s Mondays are like is one of most accurate depictions I’ve ever seen of what it’s like to work a crappy job. Not because of what it “shows” you in its capacity as a movie, but because of how it makes you feel—The performances, the narration and the scattered use of music all work coherently and collectively to let the viewer know what it’s like to be around this guy. And it sucks—But it sucks for reasons director Shaun Rose makes clear: Ellis is not a good guy; nor is he a bad guy; he is just a guy. And how he behaves depends upon his environment and how he reacts to it. The total lack of self-will becomes nauseating.
Rose’s film is not without flaws. There is a sequence involving the man’s estranged children that is uninteresting and adds little, dramatically, to the film. I feel that if the importance of this human contact were illustrated in a single real conversation between Ellis and his ex-wife, as opposed to the endless voiceovers of Ellis merely describing how he feels, the film would have benefitted as a result. That said, Upstate Story is the sum of its parts, and missteps such as the one outlined above are experienced as hiccups instead of tidal waves.
Many would describe Upstate Story as a “no-budget film,” but they would only be half right. Every movie has a budget of some kind. The ones made with little money are often more successful (artistically, that is) because of the amount of human investment in the film. If a director surrounds himself or herself with the right people, then he or she is unstoppable – with or without money.
The full film is available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_klJBcnORZo&t=1807s&fbclid=IwAR1mLCrpuIRPzNeEZqhbvxart-m304ofFF9xTpzmnB1Khndyfqxs5NTFesM&app=desktop
IMDB:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5737166/?ref_=ttmi_tt
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