Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Fergus Campbell
Starring: Elsie Fisher, Charlie B. Foster, Denny McAuliffe, Madison Hu, Simon Downes Toney, Thomas Deen Baker, Julia D'Angelo
Writer/director Fergus Campbell's feature debut Sparks isn't a biopic of the iconic pop duo. Rather it takes its name from its setting, the town of Sparks, Nevada. Arguably the most exciting thing to ever happen in Sparks was the arrival of Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable in 1960 to film scenes for John Huston's The Misfits. Campbell's film is centred on its own misfit, a young woman who longs to leave Sparks, and finds a surprising way to do so.
Elsie Fisher plays Cleo, a teenager who recently moved to the town. One day she discovers a vintage cigarette vending machine in the middle of the road, which dispenses a book of Jean-Luc Godard's film criticism. Having become obsessed with Godard, Cleo befriends a group of teens who centre their social life around "The Crop," an abandoned drive-in movie theatre. Using a crude phone projector, Cleo transforms the Crop into their own private rep house, introducing her new buddies to the work of Godard.
When Cleo speaks about her desire to have lived in 1960 Paris and collaborated with Godard, the others reveal the secret of The Crop. A nearby reservoir is said to act as a time portal, and though they've tested the theory and come up empty several times, they still believe in its potential. Taking a chance, Cleo enters the reservoir and disappears. Has she merely drowned or is she now in 1960s Paris? Infatuated with Cleo, Antoine (Charlie B. Foster) becomes determined to follow her to 1960s Paris.
Centred on a friendship between teens built around a love of old visual media, which is then disrupted when one of them enigmatically disappears, Sparks is something of a thematic cousin of Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow. It has the same melancholy teenage longing, but tonally it's a much lighter affair, at least until its closing moments. Much of it is played for absurdist laughs, and structurally it's broken down into Peanuts style vignettes that detail the various inter-personal dynamics of its youthful group. In a brief 75 minutes we come to feel like we've known these kids for much longer, and that's down to the believable performances of a young cast who resemble everyday youngsters rather than groomed movie stars.
Fisher, who looks and sounds like a sister of Maya Hawke here, recently appeared in Tyler Taormina's Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, and Sparks might be mistaken for one of Taormina's deceptively loose but thematically rich films. It explores similar ground to Taormina's outstanding debut Ham on Rye, in which a teenage girl is left alone when her friends all vanish following an odd ritual. Campbell's film flips this dynamic, focussing on the larger group left behind, most of whom are quite happy to remain in the town they've called home for all of their young lives. Rather than wishing these kids would up and leave for something better, there is a sense that adulthood is coming for them, represented by the local police who are running out of patience with their gatherings, and we yearn for them to cling onto childhood as long as they can. Sparks has the end of summer melancholia of films like Kevin Reynolds' Fandango, John Milius's Big Wednesday and Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. In its darker moments late on, there is something of Sheryl Lee's doomed Twin Peaks heroine Laura Palmer in Fisher's distressed performance. Like Twin Peaks, Sparks is about a girl who looses her innocence, and the effect of her absence on the innocent friends she leaves behind.
Sparks is teeming with a love of cinema, and while it's by no means as ground breaking as Godard's early work, it's infused with the same energetic spirit, the same sense that its filmmaker had to release their thoughts onto the screen. Its lack of a fully focussed narrative will no doubt prove problematic for some viewers, but those of us who appreciate cinema's ability to allow us to bathe in the dreams of others will happily dunk our head in its refreshing waters.
