Frontier (2001)

• Directed by David Zellner
• Starring
  • Wiley Wiggins
  • David Zellner
  • Nathan Zellner
  • Stephanie Wilson
• Produced by Nathan Zellner

Frontier, which touts itself as “the only US-Bulbovia international co-production,” is the best Bulbovian-language film you will ever see. I guarantee it. It is also almost certainly the only Bulbovian-language film you will ever see, because Bulbovia doesn’t exist. But that didn’t stop the Zellner brothers from lensing the epic tale of two Bulbovian soldiers exploring the unclaimed lands outside of Bulbovia’s frontier. Don’t worry, there are subtitles.

Equal parts surrealist, absurdist, and WTF, Frontier will amuse you, confuse you, and leave you wondering if you’re really the audience for this movie. Who would the ideal audience be? Those who felt that the moments between punchlines on Monty Python’s Flying Circus were the best part of the show. (Actually, the best audience would be those familiar with the novel Froktog by Bulbovian author Mulnar Typsthat, upon which Frontier is based, but the nonexistence of said novel is an impediment.)

The movie’s title, as rendered in the Bulbovian alphabet. Because we’re culturally sensitive, that’s why.

As a helpful voiceover informs us (in Bulbovian) that after the Klornsthog Revolution, the government of Bulbovia sent the military to find and conquer previously uncharted territories. Into this woodland, then, come two men in a canoe; the officer (director David Zellner), who sports Wolverine-style muttonchops, and the soldier (Wiley Wiggins), a paraplegic who has to wait for the officer to unfold his wheelchair before he can drag himself out of the canoe. Their mission is to categorize and acclimatize, and to that end they take samples of insects and tree bark, in between making smalltalk and singing the Bulbovian national anthem.

Somewhere in this forest there is also a bearded man (producer Nathan Zellner) who’s been on a drunken binge for so long that he can’t remember where he came from. Waking in the woods, he stumbles around until he comes to a shed with metal-working equipment in it. Having nothing better to do, he starts haltingly experimenting with the machinery.

These two doughty fellows comprise roughly three-sevenths of the Bulbovian armed forces.

While wandering the environs, the soldier hears an odd voice in the wind, and finds that he can feel his legs. In fact, he can stand, and run, and jump. The officer calls him “delusional” and orders him back into his wheelchair, but the soldier has now become something of a free spirit. The officer, upset that he can’t get any real communication out of their command post over his radio, decides that they should claim this empty land for themselves, and immediately sets out to divide it between him and the soldier. While staking out his territory, the officer discovers the bearded loner, and conscripts him into doing exactly what he was doing before, but under the officer’s authority.

And then the soldier finds an old telephone hung on a tree, so he calls home and tells his wife that he probably won’t be back ever. She responds by selling the twins and paddling in a metal tub until she, too, is in the frontier ― a sturdy babushka (Stephanie Wilson) who, when rejected by the soldier, discovers the bearded man and attracts the attention of the officer.

Not much of a taste test if there’s only one option, sweetie.

Also, there’s a felt-covered Bigfoot, and his companion in a white robe and wooden mask. But I don’t know what they’re about.

It’s a hard movie to encapsulate, because doing so would require that one knows what the movie is about, and I don’t. Oh, I know some of the things it’s about; the impulse to control, the unknown that lies beyond our comfortable habit, and stuff like that. But the Zellner brothers work hard to keep the movie from becoming an allegory or parable or any other didactic form that corresponds neatly to the “real” world. It’s not entirely senseless, but there’s a constant awareness that, while this movie would probably make sense to other people, it doesn’t to me. I think every viewer would feel like that.

Logan’s recurring nightmare.

Given that “story” is such a nebulous consideration in a production like this, I can’t criticize it, and instead have to limit my attention to the other two components that define such a movie: acting, and visuals. The acting is quite good, even though one only learns one or two words (“no,” for instance) in the Russian-German-gibberish that the performers spout as Bulbovian; despite having nothing for dialogue but streams of nonsense, the actors still manage to convey the idea that they’re actually saying something. (Stephanie Wilson as the soldier’s wife is weakest in this regard; while the other three are convincing in the accent and inflection they use, she instead sounds like someone who has been learning Esperanto at the community college.)

This, my friends, is what true love looks like.

The biggest flaw to the movie, though, is the choice of medium. Frontier really needed to be shot on film. I know that that sounds strange coming from me; you never hear me turning up my nose against video-shot features on the grounds that they aren’t “real” movies. But with a motion picture like this, which doesn’t have any sort of narrative momentum to keep the audience looking at the screen, there need to be rock-solid visuals to keep those eyeballs engaged — not flashy camera work, but more confidence and gravitas than is conveyed through a handheld digicam. What Frontier really needs is an infusion of Tarkovsky. (That’s Andrei Tarkovsky from Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), not Genndy Tartakovsky of Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack. There was enough of that.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0