What would a syllabus for a seminar on nonhuman perspectives in contemporary cinema look like? There are any number of recent documentary and fiction films about animal lives that one could put on there, including Jerzy Skolimowski’s E.O., Andrea Arnold’s Cow, and Elsa Kremer and Levin Peter’s Space Dogs. Of course, all these share the limitation that, though they transgress human/animal boundaries, they’re still at least tenuously tied to reality. Not a single one of them dares to question what it would look like if a group of Bigfoots pissed and shat all over a forest roadway in raging anger and confusion over its mere existence.
Enter David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset, a comedy that takes an unsparing guess at what the brutal, cruel, and short lives of our mythical, hirsute cousins would be like. It opens with a cheeky restaging of the so-called Patterson–Gimlin film from 1967, which claimed to capture a real-life Bigfoot, only here our eyes are drawn to four Bigfoots moving with strange gaits across the frame. From there, we’re taken on a tour through the life of a sasquatch family.
These creatures—two of whom are played by stars Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg under elaborate prosthetics—are pure id, their desires to eat, sniff, copulate, and generally fuck around untrammeled by their nascent social sensibilities. The pack has a clear alpha (Nathan Zellner) who claims first dibs on things, but they all generally live in a state of anarchic freedom. And a lot of what the sasquatches do exhibits humans’ potentially dangerous curiosity without an inkling of our already dubious reasoning capacity. One of them (Christophe Zajac-Denek), for instance, has developed the infantile habit of kissing new creatures that he discovers, which leads to something of a predicament when a turtle latches onto his tongue.
They’re also quasi-vocal at best, their grunts and whoops carrying significance only in context as signifiers of excitement, danger, or lust. (Eisenberg’s Bigfoot has almost figured out how to count, but he always loses track after three grunts.) This results in an utterly dialogue-free film, and the filmmakers prove assured stagers of visual, comic storytelling, neither anxiously vying for our attention through excessive cuts or camera movements nor turning the film into a contemplative, vibes-first nature documentary. In tone and structure, Sasquatch Sunset may be the first film to find a sweet spot between Dumb and Dumber and Earth Moods.
Naturally, the film’s story and comedy are reliant largely on the actors’ body language, including what they do with their eyes. One realizes, watching these hairy human beasts mug impassively at their compatriots’ sexual encounters, novel experiments in dining, and inadvisable tumbling exercises on a floating log, how apt we are as creatures to ascribe human emotions like droll bemusement onto eyes that are simply observing what’s in front of them.
Despite acting roughly like humans who think no one is watching them, the sasquatches are under constant observation, by each other and by other creatures of the forest (who, unlike the sasquatches, play themselves). The Zellners cut a few times to close-ups of the odd badger or porcupine staring frankly at, for example, the alpha ‘squatch rampaging through the forest, having discovered the ancillary benefits of consuming certain kinds of buds and mushrooms.
One crucial difference, of course, between a human and a sasquatch is that, for the latter, the gaze of its fellow creatures provokes no shame. Humans have hang-ups today as a result of evolution, without which it wouldn’t occur to us that the antics of these outsized apes are even funny. What we’re confronted with in Sasquatch Sunset, then, may be less the quaint idiocy of four dull simians and more our own inability to loosen up and just live.
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