House of Waltz

The Flamboyán Review

My favorite films are often those that do not fit an easy description, and perhaps that is why I am drawn to the work of Rodney Ferrer. The only consistent aspects of his work are their undeniable quality and my inability to predict where the story is going to go. A filmmaker who leapfrogs effortlessly between punk surrealism and documentary realism, to experience his work is like entering a dream as directed by John Cassavetes. The raw power and innovation of 70s cinema is always present, his Placebo Heart and Bobby Mortal play out in the modern world with an aesthetic that acts like 1975 never ended. His New York was never subject to the whitewashing of the Giuliani era or the Disneyfication of Bloomberg. His New York is populated by people who are perpetually down on their luck, grasping at straws for meaning, and even if they do obtain power or wealth, they carry their triumphs with the weariness of people who know that hitting their peak is a fleeting moment and their fall from grace is imminent. 

And yet his stories are not without hope, humor, or romance, and this is especially true of his latest, House of Waltz. As is typical of a Ferrer film, he places the audience in a world without easy explanations, even though the details are all laid out if you look for them and listen hard enough. Waltz is a perpetual dreamer, a man who clings so hard to beauty that every time he has to interact with reality he does so with rage. We meet him in a makeshift Garden of Eden--what is in fact a shack in an abandoned lot--where he spends his days painting and tending to a mute invalid in a wheelchair who he claims is his father, but given his unhinged mental state we never know for certain. An eclectic mix of society's forgotten pass by his fence--a sex worker, children in gas masks, and a homeless man known as The Desolate One who wears a macabre mask to hide his deformed face. Waltz's interactions inform us that a plague has destroyed civilization, and Waltz and the misfits he interacts with are the survivors, if "surviving" is even an appropriate description. 

The world has fallen into such disrepair that Waltz's sole relief are the recordings of a Dancer (an hypnotic Yelena Ferrer) who lived during the beginning of the plague. Her narration and the flashbacks to her life in quarantine are alternately the darkest, most unsettling parts of the film, as well as the most beautiful. While the dancer's words are cryptic and melancholy, the images of her dancing on a rooftop overlooking the empty city, or walking through a park are pure poetry. We become as enchanted with her as Waltz is, as he comes to believe that he will one day meet this mysterious woman. As his situation in the present worsens, his desire to cling to this illusionary relationship spirals along with his mental state.

These descriptions make the film sound fairly simple and straightforward, but it is anything but. I could describe more, but as with Ferrer's past works, the experience of watching this movie can only be lived through, describing it does no justice to the tone, the performances, the music, the cinematography. Even providing these details, you won't know where the story is going, and yet Ferrer's assured and stripped-down direction and masterful script never wavers, grabbing us by the jugular and pulling us wherever his imagination takes us.  Michael Whitney as Waltz gives a powerhouse performance that can only be described as grounded madness. John-Ivan Moquette as The Desolate One is unforgettable as the one-eyed man in the land of the blind (so to speak), the one survivor who accepts the world as it is instead of clinging to the past.

Written in 2020 and filmed in early 2021, the plague of the film is never specified as COVID-19, yet this story is clearly a worst-case scenario of what COVID could have been. The scenes with the Dancer took me back, emotionally, to the early days of the pandemic, which I found to be unnerving but also therapeutic. 2020/21 have become a black hole that most would rather move on from and forget, but watching this film I was moved to tears by wounds I didn't know were still open from that time. This is especially true of the way that children (including adult children and their relationship with their parents) are treated as the true victims of the pandemic. Without giving anything away, a scene in an abandoned toy store hit me with the same kind of sucker punch as the scene in Cuarón's Children of Men when the characters visit a school in a world without children. As a parent, the pandemic had a double tragedy--the loss of the world I knew before the pandemic, and the loss for my children of their childhood. My kids have not been the same since 2020, and House of Waltz taps into that tragedy in a way that turns a good movie about madness and loss into a great work of art about the search for beauty in a horrific world. 

Buy your tickets to see House of Waltz on October 31 at El Cuco Fest.