If you ask 10 Bigfoot enthusiasts what the apocryphal creature is, you’re likely to get 10 different answers. The latest and trendiest explanations are the most mystical, bolstered by advances in quantum theory. Bigfoot, so say the most far-out cyptozoologists, is an interdimensional being, a hologram essentially, that can phase in and out of our reality as effortlessly as Star Trek characters transporting to and from their vessels.
But there’s still the old-school faction, the anthropologically grounded faction, forever questing to finally identify a heretofore unknown apelike biped through irrefutable video evidence, or that Holy Grail of Bigfoot research — the body of a Sasquatch. It’s strictly the latter mythology that stirs the imagination of directing brothers Nathan and David Zellner in their new feature Sasquatch Sunset, which follows a family of Bigfoot (“Bigfeet” just doesn’t seem right) over the course of four seasons, from spring through winter, as they navigate an unidentified forest terrain.
There is no plot to speak of in this short and strange film, and no dialogue, with the beings communicating through their own language of whoops, grunts and other glottal phrases. Aside from the occasional, jarring use of camera zooms and split-screen effects, Sasquatch Sunset is fashioned like much ethnographic nonfiction —add some sagely voice-overs from David Attenborough, and many of its sequences would be ready for Nat Geo.
With all due respect to the cosmic-wormhole theorists, these four ’squatches are definitely physical. We watch them consume and excrete food, groom each other, roughhouse in the fields. For entertainment, one of them tries to count the stars in the night sky, frequently losing his place and starting over again. Sex is effortful, and ends with the male wiping down his private parts with a nearby fern. The females menstruate and lactate. Much of this is rather icky to witness — we see all manner of liquids and solids emerge from all manner of holes — but it is, of course, the cycle of life. Sasquatch: They’re just like us.
At least two of the actors, Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, are bona fide movie stars, but you’ll be hard-pressed to identify them under the remarkable makeup and costumes, and their fully invested movement work under the tutelage of mime coach Lorin Eric Salm. Perhaps those years of acting games involving communication with nonsensical utterances has yielded real, and tasty, fruit.
The absence of dialogue is the most sophisticated aspect of Sasquatch Sunset, restoring the art of cinema to its austere roots as a mostly wordless medium. It forces us to pay close attention to gestures, to nuances, to the spaces between the edits. Ride its peculiar grooves, and you’ll never feel the film is lacking a language.
Which is why it’s so frustrating that even at 89 minutes, this idiosyncratic feature overstays its welcome. Sasquatch Sunset is a novel film, but its pleasures are minor ones. That’s because even in a movie as seemingly radical as this one, the Zellner Brothers fall victim to a familiar structuralism in their story, Xeroxed from the Disney playbook of all places, right down to the loss of the family patriarch at about a third of the way through.
The Zellners fare better in their presentation of a creeping human presence threatening the Sasquatch habitat. First it’s a paved road that shockingly interrupts their forest idyll. Then it’s a campsite, complete with a portable tape player that might set the movie in the 1980s. (It turns out that Mama Sasquatch really doesn’t like Erasure.) There are signs of controlled wildfires, and other man-made interventions, but even this accumulation of existential encroachment culminates in what is basically a facile joke — an audiovisual gag that undercuts much of what came before it.
Our empathy for these creatures is earned, but the end result still reads as slight. Movies are about the feelings they engender, and for all of its surface originality, I never felt deeply invested in this family’s travails. Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine the Bigfoot or avant-garde film communities adoring the movie, nor is it likely to connect with mainstream audiences. Like the elusive figures it depicts, I suspect a willful obscurity in its future.
SASQUATCH SUNSET. Directors: Nathan and David Zellner; Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek, Nathan Zellner; Distributor: Bleecker Street; Rated R; Now playing at Cinemark Palace in Boca Raton and other area theaters