LFF 2020: Cicada
LFF 2020Art and therapy have always gone hand in hand and, in that regard, cinema has not been an exception. In fact, one glance at the works of Ingmar Bergman, John Cassavetes or Akira Kurosawa will testify to the claim that many personal demons and unresolved traumas have been committed to celluloid over the years of development of the medium. They are caged there for eternity and put on display for audiences to view, analyse and connect with on a multitude of levels.
Cicada definitely aspires to become more than just an indie drama with an appetite for festival acclaim or a cinematic mayfly with an extremely short lifespan that will wilt and perish when the festival season draws to a close. For Matthew Fifer, who wrote and directed this film, it isn’t as much a product of an artistic ambition to ‘make it’ but rather a fruit of innate drive to share his pain with the world. In fact, in contrast to many well-known extremely personal pieces of cinema like Through A Glass Darkly or Dersu Uzala, Cicada is a unique specimen because it functions as a cinematic equivalent of a group therapy session. This is because, in addition to Fifer’s own story about coming to terms with long-suppressed memories of childhood abuse, the film incorporated elements of personal trauma of one of his co-stars, Sheldon Brown.
As a result, Cicada generates a highly specific allure. It is clearly grounded in tactile realism in that it deals with honest emotions coming from the filmmakers’ bleeding souls, but at the same time, it is self-aware enough not to commit fully its sombre thematic core and adorns the narrative with relevant social commentary. Consequently, Cicada persists in a singular limbo between fiction and non-fiction; whilst it is distanced enough from the organic truth of what its dealing with to allow the viewer latitude to opine on it, it purposefully leaves shards of the artist’s soul tucked in between frames.
This translates directly to the film’s atmosphere. Cicada thrives on letting the actors be driven by what they feel they need to do as opposed to what the script tells them to, which is almost exactly how John Cassavetes approached visual storytelling. The film feels both written and improvised at the same time, much like a jazz standard is an engineered piece of highly complex music imbued with the heart and soul of the artists improvising over top of it. This immediately informs all the key scenes of the film and emboldens its thematic discourse because the actors are not being asked to play their roles, but rather they are allowed to blur the line between their characters and themselves.
In effect, a throwaway conversation among friends over a bottle of wine is suddenly transformed into a multidimensional discussion about nuances of being a gay millennial in New York. A seemingly manufactured scene where one of the leads, Sam, is trying to introduce his boyfriend to his zealously religious father and, hence, come out to him, excuses itself from needing to have an expected dramatic conclusion. A quiet moment shared by a mother and her son on a porch, enveloped by a chorus of singing cicadas, becomes a heartfelt confession of the filmmaker shedding the burden of his secret. Cicada is a collection of such moments which – much like isolated beats of the heart add up to a continuum of life – together form a cohesive narrative, instead of originating as a designed narrative whose coherence is dependent on specific scenes being built into it.
However, this quasi-vérité approach to filmmaking, perching Cicada as a synthesis of Cassavetes-esque improvisational honesty and oppressive intimacy borrowed from Derek Cianfrance, has its pitfalls. It is heavily dependent on the acting prowess of its leads as well as on the unwavering confidence of its director. Unfortunately, promising as a storyteller as he is, Matthew Fifer has only begun his filmmaking journey and Cicada isn’t the masterpiece it would have been in more experienced hands. It is occasionally clumsily edited and some of its scenes and moments have a tendency to overstay their welcome or end up hijacked by artistic inertia; a calling card of a young and inexperienced artist struggling to stay abreast of the project.
Nevertheless, what Cicada has in spades is artistic honesty, which is more than enough to call it a successful debut. It is truly a rare example of life and art folding onto one another and achieving unity, as though to resemble a cinematic Möbius strip. It is a story that beautifully achieves thematic complexity by manipulating fundamental aspects of the human condition with the respect and soulfulness they deserve and captivates the viewer with its heartfelt imagery.
