Ham on Rye

Oak Cliff Film Festival 2019 Greetings again from the darkness. Should I stay or should I go? Only it's not really your choice. Some bizarre ritual, or rite of passage (or no passage), is held to determine whether one is selected to venture into the world, or instead resigned to remaining a local forever.

We first see the teens clumped in their cliques, nervous energy palpable on the screen. Anxiety is prevalent but we aren't exactly sure why. Slowly each of the young folks makes their way to Monty's Deli - only, contrary to the title, it's not for the ham on rye. The typical awkward teenage social event is underway, only there is more at stake here than who will dance with who.

Director and writer Tyler Taormina and co-writer Eric Berger have delivered a scathing commentary not just on the suburbs, but of the realities faced by high schoolers all over. In every home town, some kids head off to college or off into the world in some other manner, while another group gets "left behind". What follows is a gap or void between those who leave and those who remain. In the film, the void even exists within families.

The film opens and closes with sequences in the community park. Young kids are quite normal - running, jumping and laughing. The older adults seem to be merely existing. There is an almost supernatural approach here by the filmmaker, but it does beg the question ... how much control do we have over our fate at that age, and are we accepting of our lot? Pretty interesting fodder for discussion.

This film seems mostly to be about the disappointment of getting older. The first half of the film is sureal and magical, it was also quite funny with bizarre existential questions being thrown around but never answered; I guess the subtext is: you don't need answer them because you're young. The second half of the film seems to be about the inevitable unfulfilled expectations and the loss of connection with people who have taken a different life path to you. Overall the first half is more enjoyable to watch and the second half is incredibly slow and down beat however, I think it leaves you feeling exactly what the film makers intended.

This small gem of an 'indie' movie has 'indie classic' written all over it. Opening on one of those American summers we all wish we could have lived through Tyler Taormina's "Ham on Rye" is a film that, in its first five minutes, could go any way. A Sofia Coppola "Virgin Suicides" rip-off? Surely not. Another gross-out teen comedy? No, these teens are too well-scrubbed, their parents perhaps just a little too off-the-wall. Come to think of it, everyone we meet in the first five minutes is just a little too off-the-wall. Is this a horror movie? Is Michael Myers lurking in the sunshine?

Perhaps it's that uncertainty demonstrated in the first five minutes that makes this the kind of movie you know you're going to treasure and if there's a precedent maybe it's the early films of Richard Linklater or something David Lynch might have made when he was sixteen, (as it progresses it certainly drifts off into Lynchian surrealism). There's no plot and the lack of 'action' is bound to alienate even its potential audience, teens of a certain age. Cineastes, however, will have a field-day with the onscreen images conjuring memories of other films as well as, hopefully, their own teenage years when doing nothing actually felt like doing something, (and there's an awful lot of doing nothing here). It's a young person's movie for sure and you could say Tyler Taormina has definitely arrived. i loved every bizarre moment.

Original, thoughtful, beautiful, intelligent. The film takes significant moments we all confront during our coming of age years, and concentrates them into loosely connected symbolic vignettes, exploring issues around identity and the roles we're assigned in life, willingly or not. It utilises a tone of suburban isolationism and being lost in the meaningless unknown to keep us off balance and wandering through uncertainty. While the narrative structure does not present a palatable or traditional plot or any form of character development, nor does the presentation guide us on what we're supposed to think or feel about anything, there is an opportunity to see the world through the lens of melancholic but unthreatening nihilism. If you can sit with slow burn, abstract narratives then you might be into this.

I loved the half that looks and feels like a Richard Linklater film, but the David Lynch half got a bit annoying and was a bit tiresome. That must be so due to the fact that I adore Linklater while Lynch never really worked for me. All in all, by the end it started to hurt.