Jay Buim’s Adventures in Success is equal parts Spinal Tap and Love Witch and very likely the kind of thing that in any other year you would’ve walked out of one Sunday afternoon from your local indie theater down the street and whispered to your friends, “Well, wanna go get a beer and not talk about the last ninety minutes?” But the point is you would’ve seen the poster and maybe read the blurb to your friend and though, Yeah, mockumentaries, I could chuckle softly to myself for a bit. There appears to be a long and storied history of this mockumentary about a group of misfits coming together to change the world through an earth-shattering female orgasm.
I like a movie about cults as much as the next guy. Sex cults especially seem like especially entertaining material for a movie, but there’s something empty in the ritual of Adventures in Success, the repetition of images that do not build on themselves, the burning yonic shapes, the mantras throughout that are atmospheric in the sense that they do not advance the plot, but not in the sense that they add to the overall emotional landscape. Our fish out of water main character, Erika, does not occupy very much time as a lead, and the movie shifts into episodes of humor split between male and female cohorts in the cult. This gives us some time to poke fun at toxic masculinity–the movie’s greatest strength is in its parody of feeble machoism–but the same care and comedy is not taken with the female cohort. There, the parody is of holistic healing and the facsimile of alternative medicine.
The groups charismatic leader “Peggy” (short for Pegasus) plays a talented bullshit artist who believes her own mantras. She stares confidently at her crew and struggles to redirect their well-meaning but hair-brained contributions to the cause as the group seeks a new source of funding for their Bohemian lifestyle. There are elements of cult comedy status for this movie about cults, and in many ways it is much more satisfying than some of its peers (see Seven Stages), but by the third act, nothing has substantially changed and the story hasn’t moved past the shallow potshots taken at the beginning about the weirdness of homegrown religions and personality movements.
Adventures marks maybe the last film of this ten day period for me. The Spotlight films I’ve been reviewing this week have been very satisfying, even if not all of them are premiering here, and there have been some gems in the rough (see Hunting Bigfoot). Forcing myself to sit down and write about every film after seeing it and being able to choose from the full selection rather than having to work backwards from what’s available before and after the Spotlight at California Theater has made for some challenges particular to the virtual festival. After a little over a year since the last time I stepped foot in a theater for this very festival, it’s still really hard to consume a new piece of art without the collective experience of viewing it with others who are seeing it for the first time, turning it over in your head for a few days with the same folks sitting to your right and left night after night.
Last summer I reflected a lot offline about the challenges of trying to watch movies without having movie critics and the threat of deadlines to see something. I think I even cited a Slate article that argued something similar in spirit. A year in, we’ve had our Oscar nominations for the weirdest year in cinema in a generation, and we’re still feeling the effects of some of those issues. Sitting through 20+ movies that were acquired to fill a void left by this firestorm of a year for media culture has shown me a few things about our pop culture fixations for the year: 1) for the most part, we’re not interested reflecting on the most obvious aspects of a year in isolation and would prefer to use movies as escapism; 2) a lot of films this year made the most progress through diverse casting of genre stories; and 3) Bigfoot fans are some of the most mesmerizing people imaginable. Here’s to next year bringing a bunch of new stories and new faces to screen.
