Imagine it's the 90s, in the early days of wide home computer use, with dial-up models, compact discs as the main mode of music listening, and you've fallen asleep in front of your television. You wake up in a dark hour and images of beaches and modern dance and a strange pair of investigators sitting on a beach trying to figure out why scientists are dying mysteriously. Perhaps you think you're still asleep, watching this strange, visually intriguing and sometimes not quite coherent story, but you can't help but be drawn in.
You might be watching Dream Team, the latest lo-fi, lo-budget speculative experimental work by American filmmakers Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn. Using 16mm film, the film is a strangely comic (not dark exactly, but not light) and more than a little cosmic story of an investigation into strange natural phenomenon and its deeper philosophical meaning, while also adding in some tongue-in-cheek erotic thriller tropes. It's not hard to guess why Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) would be a producerm given its content and style.
It begins with that feeling: possibly almost something out of the Red Shoe Diaries: a softly-lit apartment, filled with jars of coral. A woman putting on a CD of jungle sounds of Borneo. A hot bath with steam slowly rising. But then the coral emits some kind of gas, and the woman is dead. Enter No (Esther Garrel, Call Me By Your Name) and Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai, composer for the film Godland), sexy Interpol agents who are investigating similar deaths. This leads them to Dr. Beef (Minh T Mia), who spends a few scenes explaining the difference between intelligence and consciousness as it relates to coral, and why the coral might be fighting back.
No and Chase are perhaps no so interested in the deaths themselves, but why they happened, and what it means for their oceans and beaches. Hazy, loving analogue film records these spaces with a more than a hint of reverence, but also recognizing how much natural spaces can hold: a dead fish far from the ocean, two young woman making out, an old VHS tape of an exercise program. How do all these items relate? Are they indicating that this might all be a dream, hence this is just the detrice of the sleeper's mind? We wonder if we can have both consciousness and intelligence, or perhaps neither, and our survival is merely a chance event.
But while this science (which is fascinating) and philosophical musings are important, it's played against this backdrop of tactile objects, at the edge of our contemporary digital existence. Pagers, binders, fax machines, a printer set up on the beach - the tools of the trade at circa-1992, but these agents are wandering a strange world, one in which it feels like few people exist outside their sphere of investigation, or at least that they are the ones behind the veil through which the world cannot see them.
It's also played with characters looking sexy - sort of an alternate dimension of the slick and somewhat tame heteronormativity of 90s erotic thrillers; this instead is more than a little queer and open about its intentions, despite the often era-appropriate wardrobe. The more naturalized acting style from mostly non-professional performers blends well with this analogue aesthetic, paired with a dot-matrix-inspired psychedelic mental state that pervades the story. It's odd, not always coherent, sometimes veering into scenes that feel included because of an inside understanding rather than feeling natural part (however tangentially) of the film.
But that could also be part of the humour. Set as a series of chapters with very pun-y titles such as Asses to Ashes, Coral Me Bad, and Doppelgangbang, while you can get caught up in the strange oceanic mystery, you can also enjoy it for its fun homage. Dream Team is a bizarre yet compelling tale, once that evokes late nights of cable television and original stories.
Dream Team opens at the Metrograph Cinema in New York on Friday, November 15th, as part of a retrospective of Kalman and Horn's filmography.