Prologue caps Douglas Buck’s Family Portraits: A Trilogy Of America. And though you might expect the writer/ director to be a bit mental (wouldn’t Epilogue have been a better title?) he has crafted, at last, a powerhouse to cement his thesis in your grimy, grimy brains.
While Prologue plows the same bitter soil as Cutting Moments and Home, the kicker is the fact that Prologue has none of the gut-wrenching gore you’d expect from the director of Cutting Moments. Instead what you get is a glacial meditation on levels of grief and loss nearly beyond redemption.
The plot pieces aren’t terribly hard to put together, but as in the first two shorts, the viewer is mostly left to sort it out alone. Two stories seem to intertwine, that of a young girl returning home after a horrific accident that has left her crippled, and that of a reclusive old couple, the husband of which spends too much time working on art in his mysterious shed.
As hints are dropped the dots aren’t hard to connect, but that doesn’t make the air of crushing gloom and sickness any easier to take. Buck’s icily windswept ultralong takes bolster the first-rate performances. Sally Conway as Billy, (the nominal heroine of the tale) shines especially, saying more with her resigned, haunted face than any thing that could be conveyed through pages of explication.
In the end Family Portraits, and Prologue in particular, is all about what isn’t said, and the danger that is concomitant to that silence. One shudders to speculate on the type of upbringing from which Douglas Buck sprang - his trilogy lambastes the evil hiding in the nuclear family - but explorers of the dark side of life will be deeply affected and richly rewarded by his searing films.
The special edition Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America DVD includes dual commentary tracks for Prologue, Home and Cutting Moments, a track by the director and a track by different critics and professors of note. The flip-side of the DVD presents the three shorts in consecutive order as a full-length feature, though I don’t see this as any particular benefit to the work. Also on the flip-side are a number of extra goodies including a student film by Buck.
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| Billy does a lot of talking without moving her mouth. |
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| Father-figures don't fare well in Douglas Buck's America |
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| My heart's gettin' crushed just looking at this. |