{"id":1791,"date":"2011-07-09T15:30:50","date_gmt":"2011-07-09T20:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/?p=1791"},"modified":"2021-08-26T10:32:54","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T15:32:54","slug":"bad-fever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/2011\/07\/09\/bad-fever\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Fever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dustin Guy Defa\u2019s debut feature Bad Fever<\/em>, set in the director\u2019s home town of Salt Lake City, presents a fascinating study of contrasting characters: Eddie, a lonely misfit living under the thumb of his mother, and Irene (El\u00e9anore Hendricks), a harsh street hustler, with whom he gets involved.<\/p>\n

Eddie is a wannabe stand-up comic, who\u2019s not the least bit funny. It\u2019s a role perfectly suited to Harmony Korine, but Defa cast mumblecore director Kentucker Audley in the part. The choice proves oddly intriguing because Audley, who directed and acted in Team Picture<\/em> (2007) and Open Five<\/em> (2010), has been a strident advocate of naturalistic acting based on a performer’s own life. For him to play such a stylized role is clearly out of character. The irony turns out to be the fact that Audley is often improvising, whereas Hendricks appears to be working closer to the page. Both are credited with providing \u201cadditional material\u201d to the film\u2019s script.<\/p>\n

Bad Fever<\/em> begins with a closeup of Irene making a phone call. When there\u2019s no answer, she strolls over and stands in front of a convenience store. As someone approaches, she asks the person to buy her a pack of cigarettes. Irene seems desperate, as she circles around nervously. She opens the door and yells, \u201cMarlboro Lights!\u201d Eddie, a young man with long hair and a blue cap pulled down, as if he\u2019s trying to appear invisible, exits and hands her the pack. He gets in his car and drives off, as she lights a cigarette in the background.<\/p>\n

They come together roughly ten minutes later when Eddie picks up Irene while driving through the city one night. She tells him, \u201cMaybe you can buy me something to eat or something like that.\u201d She asks Eddie, \u201cAre you hungry? Do you want to get something to eat with me? You want to share a plate of food with me? You want to get a milkshake together? Do you want to get two straws in a milkshake?\u201d Even poor Eddie surmises that Irene is coming on to him.<\/p>\n

At a restaurant, Eddie asks Irene, \u201cDo you have a boyfriend?\u201d The awkwardness of their conversation is a bit unnerving \u2013 like watching a spider spin a web to ensnare a naive and unsuspecting victim. That becomes clear later when Irene begins to film herself in the back seat of Eddie\u2019s car with an antiquated video camera. When he inquires what she\u2019s doing, she mentions making videotapes for a guy in Idaho Falls she met on the Internet. We begin to wonder, but Irene assures Eddie, \u201cI don\u2019t do anything sexual, all right?\u201d But when Eddie watches her VHS tape at home later on, the sexual connotations of her eating a bowl of cereal are unmistakable.<\/p>\n

The next day, Irene takes Eddie to an abandoned schoolhouse. As the camera is running, she asks seductively, \u201cDo you like me?\u201d After a pregnant pause, he answers, \u201cYeah, I think I do.\u201d She asks him to take off his jacket. He wants her to turn off the video camera, but she insists, \u201cNo, that should stay on.\u201d She takes his hand and begins to suck on his index finger. Irene orders him to lie down and take off his clothes. She becomes more abusive and barks, \u201cAre you fucking deaf and dumb? Take off your fucking shirt!\u201d She pulls off his pants and tells him, \u201cTake off your underwear, you stupid bitch!\u201d When he freaks out, she calls him a \u201cpussy.\u201d In leaving, Eddie apologizes, but insists that videotaping him sexually isn\u2019t terribly romantic.<\/p>\n

Even though Eddie is flustered by what\u2019s happened, he\u2019s smitten with Irene. He decides she\u2019s someone he\u2019d like his mother to meet, along with his imaginary comedy club fans. Eddie puts on a sports coat and tracks her down. Back at the abandoned school, Irene spray paints \u201cdick\u201d under a lewd drawing she makes of one. She then begins to direct Eddie in a home video and quickly turns into a dominatrix by making him pretend to have sex with a pink mop. Dressed in Eddie\u2019s clothes, she then forces him to participate in a mind-boggling gender reversal that is so humiliating it\u2019s truly painful to watch \u2013 not unlike what occurs to another social outcast, Keith Sontag (Dore Mann), in Ronald Bronstein\u2019s Frownland<\/em> <\/a>(2008). This unlikely romance follows its inevitable trajectory, which is to suggest that more humiliation awaits poor Eddie.<\/p>\n

Defa, who\u2019s been making film since he was a kid, has an incredibly strong visual sense that feels effortless. There are some wonderfully subtle shots, such as when golden light reflects intermittently off the back of Eddie\u2019s head as the camera follows behind him. Shots of railroad yards and deserted city streets at night suggest the desolation of an alien planet, which is reinforced by the sound of howling wind. The pacing of the film, which Defa attributes to his editor, David Lowery, who reshaped the structure of the film, is pitch-perfect. Yet, because Bad Fever<\/em> is essentially a character study, the film succeeds largely due to the riveting performances of Audley and Hendricks (along with Annette Wright as Eddie\u2019s mom and Allison Baar as Yoko in small roles).<\/p>\n

Having seen Audley in his own films, what he\u2019s doing performance-wise in Bad Fever<\/em> feels incredibly risky, especially his use of idiosyncratic speech patterns and willingness to engage in embarrassingly unfunny comic skits. Hendricks, who appeared as the lead in Josh Safdie\u2019s The Pleasure of Being Robbed<\/em> (2008) and in Josh and Benny Safdie\u2019s Daddy Longlegs<\/em> <\/a>(2010), proves terrific once again \u2013 a master at rolling her eyes. She manages to convey the pathology of Irene\u2019s character through very small gestures, such as the way she holds and then carries a gray and white cat. Irene has adopted a hard edge as a means of survival \u2013 a defense mechanism that Eddie sadly lacks. But, even more importantly, Irene appears well-versed in feminist film theory. She clearly grasps the gendered dynamic of cameras and power, especially how to undercut the visual pleasure of the male gaze.<\/p>\n

Bad Fever<\/em> premiered at SXSW in March. The film is playing as part of a series, \u201cInside Jokes,\u201d programmed by Mike King, at the UW Cinematheque<\/a>. Defa\u2019s film will have its Madison premiere on Thursday, July 28 at 7 PM. Local fans of indie cinema should not miss the opportunity to see it. The Brooklyn-based filmmaker will be in attendance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dustin Guy Defa\u2019s debut feature Bad Fever, set in the director\u2019s home town of Salt Lake City, presents a fascinating study of contrasting characters: Eddie, a lonely misfit living under the thumb of his mother, and Irene (El\u00e9anore Hendricks), aRead More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1832,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1791"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4348,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1791\/revisions\/4348"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jjmurphyfilm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}