Crime Wave (John Paizs, 1985) (Patreon)

One of those films I always meant to catch up with just based on its reputation, Crime Wave, the debut feature by Winnipeg's John Paizs, turned out to be quite a bit different than I expected. I figured it would be a low-budget, nominally ironic spoof of hard-boiled B-movies like Detour or Gun Crazy, the sorts of highly self-aware films that don't really need to be spoofed in the first place. But that's not even close to what Crime Wave actually is. 

What Paizs has actually made is, in its utterly inscrutable, sui generis way, both completely meta-textual and at the same time eerily naive. Yes, the naivety is a put-on, but it is so convincing as to be genuinely disturbing, as though we are actually watching some sort of unearthed example of primitive amateur cinema, completely unaware of the lurid sexuality and barely-contained violence coursing through its veins. Crime Wave is an educational film about narrative structure and child molestation, but it is so straightfaced that it could honestly convince you that is blissfully unaware of this ugly fact.

Let me back up a bit. Crime Wave is narrated by a young girl, Kim (Eva Kovacs), who is describing the travails of the creepy boarder who lives above her family's garage. This man, Steven Penny (Paizs), is a student filmmaker who dreams of making "color crime pictures" based on pulp magazines. Kim's interest in Steven is inappropriate to say the least, and Steven, who exhibits a blank, studied guilelessness, spends hours alone with Kim, regaling her with random film knowledge. He shows off his Bolex, teaches her about persistence of vision, and even brings her into his darkroom to show her his prized role of Kodak 7291.

As Kim explains to her class, Steven has a problem. He is great at coming up with beginnings and endings, but he can't work out the middles of his scripts. Steven works after hours, his typewriter illuminated by a nearby streetlight, struggling to complete a script. Each morning, Kim goes to Steven's trashcan and retrieves the discarded results, hoarding them like precious love notes. And over the course of Crime Wave, Paizs shows us several mini-movies consisting of Steven's beginnings and endings, these "failures" exhibiting a square-jawed, faux-1950s bluster, along with an almost structuralist formal redundancy.

So what exactly is Paizs up to? Well, it should be noted that the director emerged from the same 1980s Winnipeg scene that gave us Guy Maddin (and, considerably later, Matthew Rankin). Paizs has made two other features and several shorts. Only his second film, the sci-fi horror parody Top of the Food Chain, starring Campbell Scott, got some traction, and he has been a film school professor intermittently in the intervening years. 

Comparing Crime Wave to Maddin's work is instructive. Where Maddin found his primary inspiration in the heightened melodrama and gesticular acting of the silent cinema, Paizs's sources are a bit more oblique. Crime Wave combines identifiable forms -- the same crime fiction that spawned pastiche works like Aki Kaurismäki's Calamari Union or Robinson Devor's The Woman Chaser, for example, as well as educational / industrial films. But there are moments that turn these genres inside out, producing an uneasy dissonance that goes well beyond parody. Paizs's direct-address didacticism bears traces of Owen Land's experimental cinema, where the smug tone of conventional education (think "Dora the Explorer") is wedded to cinematic self-reflexivity, to undermine the irony of an artist "revealing how it's done."

If anything, Crime Wave resembles Maddin's strongest and most complex film, The Forbidden Room. Like that film, Crime Wave introduces multiple possible narrative threads, yokes them together with a theoretical framework, and in so doing draws attention to the absurdity of using cinema as a vehicle for storytelling. But Crime Wave operates with a hint of awkward menace. Kim tries to connect Steven with a "helper" who can provide his films with the connective tissue they so desperately need. As it happens, this script doctor is literally insane. In the end, it is only the love of the underage Kim, driven by a forbidden horniness she doesn't even fully understand, that can make the cinema "whole." 

Where Guy Maddin's films play out with the elegance of Freudian analysis, John Paizs's Crime Wave is like an uncommunicative weirdo jerking off in the Barbie section of a Toys-R-Us. See it immediately.