DRIB (Kristoffer Borgli, 2017) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Emilio

It's fitting that as Kristoffer Borgli's newest film Sick of Myself is wending its way through theaters, I should be asked to have a look at the director's previous feature, which is available for viewing on a number of platforms (Amazon, Vudu, Tubi) but was hobbled by legal difficulties from which it could never quite bounce back. Its final form, as a semi-factual documentary reenactment of a series of incidents that, in their true form, were unfilmable because of trademark infringement and a signed NDA, is more curious than satisfying. If you charted it all out, DRIB's Moebius treatment of cinematic reality probably owes something to Godard and Kiarostami, but seeing it all applied to a tale of hipster Internet assholery feels unavoidably glib.

Truthfully, though, DRIB has a lot more in common with the capitalist pranksterism of Czech Dream and the strident self-importance of Caveh Zahedi's late films. The subject is Iranian-Finnish actor and comedian Amir Asgharnejad, who would only give Borgli the rights to his story if he were allowed to play himself. He gains some notoriety by posting staged but realistic prank videos on the web, in which he goads "random" people on the street to kick his ass. (The concept, I believe, was cribbed from an abortive Harmony Korine project.) This edgy realism, and Amir's unmitigated attitude, is noticed by an ad exec, Brady Thompson (Brett Gelman), who brings Amir to L.A. for an energy drink campaign.

Predictably, the campaign falls apart, because the squeamish sponsor (which, let's face it, is probably the luckless Bang brand) isn't sure that Amir's brand of presumably unsimulated violence is as palatable a tie-in as Brady thinks it is. (They want a dirt-bike racer instead.) But over the course of four days, Amir navigates the fringes of American brand-building, smirking all the while, since he sees himself as a punk anarchist in the tradition of Andy Kaufman.

If there's a real message in DRIB, it's that Amir is full of shit, and his insistence that he is above it all makes him only more so. After all, Brady breathlessly explains to Amir that he is "not really an ad guy," and sees his own work with brand-scaling as a kind of anti-capitalist accelerationism. Borgli fills his film with personalities from the hippest corners of the world of meme-ertainment, including an amusingly peevish Adam Pearson and struggling actress turned Internet personality Annie Hamilton. It's clever, I suppose, but Borgli has very little to say about these callow trend-chasers jockeying for their 15 minutes on TikTok. The worst "content" in the world tends to be produced by some of the worst people in the world. Color me surprised.