听 American director John Maringouin's distressing documentary Running Stumbled portrays the deeply dysfunctional relationship between his father Johnny Roe Jnr, whom prior to the shoot he hasn't seen for three decades, and his stepmother Virgie Marie Pennoui. The film-maker doesn't bother with a voice-over or sketching out back-stories for his characters: he simply pitches up at the couple's junk-strewn Louisiana home and plunges us into their nightmarish everyday existence, which is marked by crazed arguments.
A one-time Cubist painter and an ex-pimp, who claims that "running stumbled is my middle name", Johnny is now addicted to prescription pharmaceuticals,and relishes verbally abusing his equally foul-mouthed partner, who's herself ridden with cancer. She vehemently accuses Johnny of having tried to kill Maringouin when the he was a baby, a charge which is denied by the older man.
"HARD TO DENY THE FILM'S VISCERAL CHARGE"
Shot digitally over a ten day period, and split into 13 chapters, this highly stylised film maintains a visually fractured, often hallucinatory atmosphere. There are flashes of gallows humour, not least Johnny's determined foray into a late-night supermarket to load up on painkillers. But there are awkward questions that need to be considered here about the ethics of filming such mentally disturbed individuals. Are Johnny, Marie and Uncle Stanley, whose mother is on the verge of death, being exploited for their strangeness? It's hard, however, to deny the film's visceral charge, and there's a truly unexpected post-Hurricane Katrina coda.
Running Stumbled is out in the UK on 27th July 2007.
