Harmony Korine Returns With a New Tune

Movies

By STEVE DOLLAR
April 22, 2008

AUSTIN, Texas — Harmony Korine loves a good yarn. While onstage at the South by Southwest film festival last month, he greeted the audience with a story at least as strange as that evening's premiere feature, "Mister Lonely." The film, which opens next week and is Mr. Korine's first in eight years, details an enchanted yet tragic love affair between a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) and his Marilyn Monroe counterpart (Samantha Morton) at a celebrity look-alike commune in the Scottish Highlands.

Fans of the doggedly outré Mr. Korine, 35, have good reason to wonder what he's been up to since his rush to notoriety in the 1990s, first as the underage screenwriter of Larry Clark's voyeuristic teen AIDS provocation "Kids" (1995), and then as the director of the bizarrely original cult films "Gummo" (1997) and "Julien Donkey-Boy" (1999). As he explained it, he was severely burned out. And in the time-honored fashion of any good Southerner, the Nashville native went fishing — though not in Nashville. While living with his parents in their solar-powered house in the Panamanian jungle, he fell in with a group of fishermen who called themselves "The Malingerers."

"They were searching for this special golden fish with three dots on its side," he told the crowd. "There's, like, one photograph of it from the last [19th] century." Mr. Korine had fled to his family's home in Central America after disastrous stays in Connecticut and Queens, where he said two houses he occupied burned down, and in Paris, where he became so addicted to drugs that his teeth began to fall out. But even this quixotic adventure, which lasted six months, didn't quite offer redemption. At least not in the way he expected. As it turned out, the fish were bartering chips, not spiritual tools.

"I heard whispers of a reward being offered by the Japanese, like for a million dollars," he said. "And I got pissed off." Insulted by the mercenary agenda, he moved back to Nashville. One of the fishermen's wives, fond of walking her "invisible dog" on a leash, gave Mr. Korine her pet as a parting gift.

"I told her I didn't believe her," he said. "But when I was back in Nashville, living in this guy's basement, I hung the leash on the wall. Two weeks later, when I was asleep, I heard these barking sounds. And when I woke up, I started envisioning nuns on bicycles in the sky, and this idea of faith and hope came to me and I thought maybe I could make a movie again."

Recounting the tale over a café table, Mr. Korine seems perfectly matter-of-fact, boyish and rumpled with a full beard and a hint of basset hound under his wide eyes.

Those skydiving nuns, kept aloft only by their purity of heart, make for some of the most arresting imagery in "Mister Lonely," which juxtaposes its romantic narrative with airborne interludes above a rainforest and the fevered rantings of a mad priest played by Mr. Korine's fan, the German director Werner Herzog. ("As soon as he got off the airplane, he looked up in the sky," Mr. Korine said before donning his Herzog impersonation. "He was like, 'Buzzards and vultures! Ahhh. I know I'm home now.'")

The film's other inspiration came from a darker period, when Mr. Korine was struggling — and failing — to rebuild his life in Paris. "I used to see this guy dancing, a German guy, out my window late at night, people ignoring him: a Michael Jackson impersonator."

Beyond the obvious appeal that marginal, outcast characters have for Mr. Korine, he felt something more conceptual in the nature of impersonators. "They have no race," he said. "They aren't black and they aren't white. They're not a child and they're not a man. They're not male or female. The main character was more of an abstraction, an idea."

The film, co-written with Mr. Korine's brother, Avi, and shot on location in four different countries, is a huge stretch for the director, who made his reputation with perversely intimate excursions into side pockets of Americana. The visual style, with its intimations of William Eggleston (a friend) and Diane Arbus, flourishes on a bigger budget. The story, though, is Mr. Korine's most conventional, despite the imaginative premise and such casting inspirations as the British screen icon James Fox ("The Servant," "Performance") as a papal impersonator, shacked up with Anita Pallenberg as Queen Elizabeth. Less obvious for some viewers is an insider homage to a scene from R.W. Fassbinder's "Martha." Mr. Korine immediately cops to the citation, a scene in which Ms. Morton's character falls asleep and is allowed by her estranged husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant), to get a terrible sunburn. "I thought it would be fun to put it in there," he said.

Mr. Korine became a movie addict as a child, encouraged by his father, who made documentaries for PBS in the 1970s and '80s. The campus theater at Vanderbilt University was his cinematheque, with $3 tickets to double bills.

It may have been comforting memories of those times that lured Mr. Korine back to Nashville, where last year he married his wife, Rachel, and sought a simpler life. "All I need is a couple of bookstores and a movie theater, and I'm set," he said. "You know, when I first got into movies, seeing [Mr. Herzog's] 'Even Dwarfs Started Small' or 'Stroszek,' or watching the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton movies, it makes you believe in something. There's this kind of poetry to them and a rhythm to them that goes very deep."