I happened to randomly walk in on photographer/video/performance artist Laurel Nakadate’s The Wolf Knife while at PS1 this past weekend. The movie is part of a pretty huge exhibit of Nakadate’s work, and I have to be honest, was my first real taste of her work. I really loved it. Nakadate is an attractive woman who puts herself in incredibly uncomfortable situations in front of the camera, as well as creates an uncomfortable relationship between the photograph or video viewer and what he/she is looking at. I’m not going to get into a whole examination of her work, but for example, a large majority of her video work is finding strange men in seedy locales across the country, inviting herself back to their homes, and asking them to, say, pretend it’s her birthday. She videotapes the interaction. It’s the sort of thing that feels like something incredibly bad could happen at any moment, yet nothing ever does.

The show included a lot of her video work (which lasts 3-10 minutes usually) and when I sat down to watch The Wolf Knife, I thought it’d be another short. But after 40 minutes I decided to check the title card and come to discover this was in fact a full length film, and Nakadate’s second as a writer and director.

No one besides my girlfriend and I lasted through the whole film at the showing we saw. People usually came in and lasted 15 minutes, tops, before leaving. One family brought their children in, quickly ushering them out again when the film began showing incredibly questionable situations. I’m not sure if most people walking out weren’t prepared to sit through a 90 minute feature or the film itself just wasn’t their cup of tea, but judging from the many negative reviews the film received when it was first released, I’m going to assume it’s mainly the latter.

Shot entirely on a handheld digital camera, The Wolf Knife features mostly amateur actors playing out what I assume are just loosely-given plot instructions. It’s incredibly lo-fi and the closest thing I can even compare it to is Harmony Korrine’s Gummo, another film people either love or hate. There is some raw yet incredibly attractive cinematography (which mirrors Nakadate’s photographic work) against some very bad acting by the sort of creepy yet commanding screen presences Korrine utilizes regularly – they’re even Tim & Eric-esque in their badness.

The story focuses on Chrissy and June, two sixteen year old girls from Hollywood, Florida who decide to run away to Memphis. The girls are basically both Lolita archetypes, making ideal foils for translating Nakadate’s video art into a feature film. Nakadate does everything possible to amp up the girls’ erotisism short of having them appear nude or engaged in any real sex. But there’s plenty of skimpy and revealing clothing, wettened lips, Sapphic undertones and gratuitous camera angles focusing on thighs and the crotch. There’s never a point where the viewer of the movie isn’t aware of or forced directly to come to terms with the two lead’s youth, naivete and sexual awakening.

It’s a compelling device, but also incredibly uncomfortable to watch (for both men and women, possibly for different reasons), so I’m not blaming anyone who wasn’t able to sit through it. But that doesn’t make it any less successful, as this is the underlying point of almost all of Nakadate’s work. The girls are placed in countless situations of dubious morality as they journey from Hollywood to Memphis, with plenty of inappropriate behavior from older men that seems to stop just before it goes too far.  Oh wait, by the way, the reason they’re going to Memphis is because Chrissy wanted to see and possibly move in with her former 3rd grade teacher who she’s been corresponding with, so that’s a good example of what I mean when I say “dubious morality.” The scene where they meet up is the film’s climax, and easily it’s most disturbing and confusing scene.

Like Gummo, this is not a plot-driven film. It’s all situational and voyeuristic, based on how you, the viewer, process what is happening on screen and what is insinuated. Nakadate has made an incredibly earnest and thought-provoking examination of the confusions females experience when they reach adolescence, be it identity, relationships or sexuality – or all of the above, at once. I really hate to keep hammering home the Gummo point, but I imagine a larger number of our readers have seen it and if you’re a fan of anything Korrine has done (or just that general aesthetic), this not only worth seeing, but incredibly well done. No, it’s not for everyone, but for those of you who don’t mind feeling like a creepy perv for 90 minutes. You’ll appreciate it, and well, you know who you are.

I’m not sure where you can catch a screening of The Wolf Knife (originally released in 2010) or easily find it on DVD, as it’s not available on Netflix. But it is screening at Ps1 currently as part of the Laurel Nakadate: Only the Lonely exhibit (which I also really recommend seeing in general), which is on view until August 8th. The film is free with your admission into the museum.

- My Pal the Crook