Promises Written In Water

Venice (In Competition) – Vincent Gallo has returned with his first directorial feature since The Brown Bunny earned him boos at Cannes. So, asks Emma Rowley, did Promises Written In Water fare better at the critics' screening in Venice?

Kevin (Gallo) is an ex hit man. Searching for a job, he finds a wanted ad for an assistant to a world-famous mortician. He takes the job. His girlfriend Colette has phoned him to tell him she is going abroad with another man. He meets up with another girl he likes, Mallory. Mallory is dying. He criticises the way she conducts her love life, then invites her to move in with him. Later, she phones his girlfriend and when Kevin discovers this, he berates her while she cries. He refuses an offer from his Mafia contact to return to work. Mallory dies and Kevin cannot bear to touch her corpse, though he has promised to cast her ashes into a lake (the promise that the film's title may refer to).

The above sounds like a relatively coherent plot but it involves some interpretation of the onscreen events. Promises Written In Water is perhaps Gallo's least accessible film to date. Much of its brief 75-minute running time features Gallo himself, the camera hugging his face tight as he smokes, paces, sighs. There are also numerous conversational scenes in which the traditional two-shot is eschewed in favour of a static shot of Gallo's face and the back of his interlocutor's head. In many ways, it plays like a parody of a Gallo film and this is perhaps what he intended, although there are indicators that it is a fuck-you to critics after the mauling The Brown Bunny received.

Like the protagonist he plays in that film, Bud Clay, Kevin is self-absorbed and sensitive to the point of being a colossal dickhead; an unpleasant person who feels it is his duty to impose his own opinions on others under the guise of honesty. Meanwhile his own problems engage him to the point where he is incapable of empathising with those around him. Even when he attempts to tell Mallory how he feels about her, he begins his confession with the words, “When I first saw you, I really didn't like you,” though he continues more tenderly, “but now I see your face, it's like the one I've been looking for always.”

Death is the key theme of the film, the title perhaps being a take on Keats' broken-hearted deathbed request for his tombstone's inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Kevin's first job (only tangentially alluded to the the film) is as a hired killer. His second is as a mortician. Between, it seems that he has had an existential crisis, maybe triggered by the knowledge of Mallory's imminent death. It has transformed him from a man ushering people towards death to the caretaker of their dead bodies. Nonetheless, his relationship with death and dying is still fraught. In one scene, he uncovers the naked body of a dead girl, props her upright against a wall, photographs her, and then returns her to her original position. It is done matter-of-factly but feels cold and exploitative; a selfish way for Kevin to face up to the ephemerality of existence.

It is the dying Mallory who exudes life. A short, frenetic sequence in which she dances, '60s style, is the highlight of the film. The character is played by ex-model Delfine Bafort and there is one scene towards the end of the film in which the camera travels over her body in extreme close-up and she turns to display her most intimate areas – underarms, neck, breasts, vulva. It recalls the much ballyhooed scene in The Brown Bunny where Chloe Sevigny's character gives Bud a blow-job.

Is this critic-baiting? Gallo cannot have dreamt up this sequence without considering the criticism Sevigny received. (After The Brown Bunny, Sevigny was idiotically dropped by The William Morris Agency for playing a role that they considered little more than porn.) It's possible that Gallo is still smarting from the reaction to his previous effort. It would certainly explain the film's refusal to explain itself, and the fact that Gallo has produced no stills for reviewers to use when writing about it. (The top picture is taken from Buffalo 66.)

Promises Written In Water is stylishly shot on grainy black and white stock by Masanobu Takayanagi. The form of the film is somewhat odd, containing at least one scene which seems to be an unedited cut of Gallo and Bafort running their lines. They are on a date and she asks if he has phoned his girlfriend, Colette. He tells her that Colette has gone to Thailand with a 55-year-old man but that she still loves him, that he is still her favourite. The conversation becomes circular and Mallory asks again. His response is repeated two or three times. The last time he says it, the place name changes to Taiwan.

The film was written, edited, directed and produced by Gallo. He also wrote the (infrequent) music. The opening, Gallo-heavy credits elicited laughter at the press and industry screening I attended, a response that degenerated into mass walkouts after the first quarter of an hour, while others fidgeted, talked among themselves and even took phone calls. At the end, there was a smattering of applause and more booing. It was a pretty appalling response considering the short running time of the film.

It's hard to know how to score a film that is so uncompromising and experimental. I was never bored watching it, there are some excellent scenes and overall it's rather an intriguing film. Nonetheless, just as Gallo trusts Masanobu Takayanagi's cinematography, he should likewise find a sympathetic editor to work with, rather than cutting his own movies. Doing so could see him producing an arthouse masterpiece.

Rating on a scale of 5 shots of the back of actors' heads: 2

Release date: TBC
Directed by: Vincent Gallo
Screenplay by: Vincent Gallo
Cast: Vincent Gallo, Delfine Bafort, Brenda Epperson, Sage Stallone, Lisa Love
Rating: TBC
Running time: 75 minutes 

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