In the beginning, and just for a little while, Tyler Taormina‘s “Ham on Rye” seems like every other no-budget suburban coming-of-ager you’ve ever seen, if maybe better shot. Carson Lund‘s superb cinematography, apparently influenced by photographers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, picks out boys riding skateboards, borrowing Dad’s Volvo, and talking about the crucial importance of boning, like it’s a philosophy, like they’re the first ones ever to have had so original a thought. Girls primp their frou-frou dresses and exchange back-spinning compliments according to arcane queen bee hierarchies, before posing on stairways as parents twitter and coo at them with cameras. You might even feel the anticipatory dread of the familiar: oh no, not another prom movie – tenderly observed, with just enough acne-ridden raunch to give a little edge to its otherwise placid, complacent lament for childhood’s passing – not again. But it quickly morphs into a different sort of anticipation, the distinctly pleasurable dread of the wholly unfamiliar, or rather, the deeply uncanny, the thing that looks so much like life that all you can see are the ways it is not at all lifelike. Turns out, Taormina mistrusts the high school dramedy as much as you do, and he’s here to skewer its inanity with odd insight and deep, perhaps angry melancholy: a cocktail stick of profundity pins this hoagie through the heart.
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The teenagers – most of them acting first-timers, with an untrained awkwardness in tune with the off-kilter vibe – collect into little tribes, on their way to a bizarre social event, held at the uninspiring Monty’s Deli. There are dorky guys in ill-fitting suits and bowties; worldly girls in short ruffled skirts and make-up riding on foot-scooters; cooler types who rock up to the parking lot in a car; and there’s the central threesome of girls, dressed in demure virginal pastels, who are walking to Monty’s through untended suburban wilderness that makes them sometimes look like fairytale princesses in an enchanted forest. But then, ringleader Gwen (Audrey Boos) “really has to shit” and skips across a lawn to up to a house, and however, the shot is framed and lit, it looks like ’70s De Palma, all glowy and romantic with a foretaste of horror.
Once the kids arrive at the deli, where a slightly older guy in a bandana looks out at them surlily and grinds meat in the back room, a strange coupling ritual begins, part pairing-off-at-a-disco, part being-picked-for-basketball. And then some of them are magicked away, a process that happens here with a crude, pencil-eraser-style effect – the whole film is drenched in old-fashioned stylistic flourishes, that somehow manage not to foreground themselves but create a mood of heightened ambiguity: long, slow-fading dissolves; abrupt sound edits; janky close-ups; and sudden, non-sequitur inserts, like of a father giving his son a manly, go-get-em pep talk. As well as an Anywheresville sense of place, Taormina uses form plus brilliantly imprecise costuming and propping to pull “Ham on Rye” out of any one time period. The kids have phones, but they seem to be flip-tops, seldom used, and when later some of the older boys glide off into the night on more modish electronic hoverboards, somehow the contradiction doesn’t disrupt the film’s own little enclosed continuum.
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The second half is darker and lonelier, following those left behind, especially Haley (Haley Bodell), who ran from the diner when her humiliation became too great and is now, like all her fellow rejects, apparently condemned never to escape this world of duck ponds, wisteria-draped driveways, and doorbells that are never answered. And it’s here that the film matures into a weirdly sorrowful look at what our world does to teenagers, at the exceptionalism peddled to them without any sense of what they are exceptional from, and how much more likely it is, when you deal in the currency of exclusivity, that you will end up among the excluded.
Taormina has an unusually firm grasp on the intangible uneasiness of bland middle-class Americana, and in his debut feature, he drags into the foreground the kind of stuff that usually happens in the corner of your eye. On the spectacularly well-chosen soundtrack, sixties bubblegum pop sits alongside electronic drones and the inspired reclamation of German New Age flautist Deuter‘s shimmery, folk-horror melodies. So sometimes the film is “Dazed and Confused” via “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” sometimes it is “Carrie” via “Superbad” and sometimes, as in a shot of a flowering hedgerow seething with chirruping crickets, it is absolutely “Blue Velvet” – overtly acknowledging that you can’t really do suburban surreal without begging the Lynch comparison. But with all these signifiers, as well as the title, which sends us back to Charles Bukowski‘s coming-of-age memoir of the same name, which itself refers to “The Catcher in the Rye,” pretty soon the references multiply to the point you have to give in and call “Ham on Rye” its own, pretty unique thing.
Today is David Lynch’s birthday, so it’s appropriate to be thinking about rotting picket fences right now. But it is also Inauguration Day 2021 and “Ham on Rye” is heartening evidence that even throughout the last few years of permanent, screeching crisis, there have been filmmakers paying attention to the smaller things, to the more mundane cruelties of our world, that will require much more than a change of administration to address. “Ham on Rye” is not obviously political, but it is also deeply political, pointing out, in lazy, absurdist, carelessly clever frames a deep-set American wrongness that was quietly murmuring away long before the current blowhard moment, and that will continue long after. Its roots go that far down, and spread that far wide under the strange earth of the American suburb. [A-]
“Ham on Rye” is available now on MUBI.