Mister Lonely

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2007

Mister Lonely
Harmony Korine
United Kingdom/France/Ireland/USA, 2007
English
112 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: 0’Salvation Cine Ltd./Recorded Picture Company/ARTE France Cinéma/Love Streams agnés b. Productions/Metropolitan Film Production Ltd./Fuzzy Bunny Inc.
Executive Producer: Peter Watson
Producer: Nadja Romain
Screenplay: Harmony Korine, Avi Korine
Cinematographer: Marcel Zyskind
Editor: Paut Zucker, Valdis Oskarsdéttir
Production Designer: Richard Campling
Sound: Jamie Gambell
Music: Jason Spaceman, Sun City Girls
Principal Cast: Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant, James Fox, Melita Morgan

Nuns fling themselves out of airplanes at the barking command of Werner Herzog while a Michael Jackson impersonator obsesses over the sun’s effects on his skin. Such visions can only mean one thing: that Harmony Korine, the director of Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, is back with us after far too long a pause in his filmmaking career.

Korine’s greatest strength is his ability to take an unironic, empathetic position on characters that could easily be seen as grotesque and freakish. Mister Lonely has its share of unusual personalities, but this time Korine wants to explore how these characters—all somehow psychically dislocated from themselves—might create a community and successfully interact as human beings. The result is bittersweet and absolutely unique.

Two parallel stories examine contrasting sides of this idea. In the first and most dominant narrative, a Michael Jackson impersonator in Paris (tenderly played by Diego Luna) leads a painfully lonely existence when not moonwalking on the banks of the Seine. One day a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton) approaches him. They soon become friends and she describes a utopian retreat in the Scottish Highlands where “people like them” can gather in their second skins without the sting of society’s rebuke. When he arrives, however, the social dynamics of this celebrity-impersonator commune and the burning need to perform threaten to undermine the precarious psychological lives they maintain.

At the same time, in a kind of poetic expression of divine devotion, Herzog’s nuns prepare to meet their maker by jumping without parachutes from airplanes over Central America.

Korine is asking us to reflect on people who hold seemingly irrational beliefs, inscribing his celebrity impersonators into a long tradition of existentialist leaps of faith and the history of miracles. His take on the human condition may be far from conventional, but it certainly yields important truths about what motivates our least logical actions. —Noah Cowan