Chances are potentially relatively high that all of us, at some point or another, have abandoned a project or two that could revolve around almost any task, from upgrades to one’s home to that yet-unfinished memoir to a rusty car in dire need of some TLC, still occupying space in an out of the way carport ready for that day when motivation strikes and the time comes to get back to work. It is this theme, that of unfinished work, which fuels the majority of “The Flipside,” a unique entry into the world of documentary filmmaking that explores this dilemma, touches on the creative side of documentary construction as a whole, and somehow manages to serve as a musing on the passage of time in a way that the end result finds all its ingredients working well together when all logic, as well as the words spoken in narration by director Chris Wilcha, indicate it all should not.
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“The Flipside” uses several subjects as a launching point for the greater story; by starting the film with scenes taken from a doc Wilcha had hoped to finish on legendary blues photographer Herman Leonard, he’s able to easily segue from a few brief words on how this particular project ended up abandoned back to reminiscing about the beginning of his career when a white-collar marketing position in the offices of the Columbia Music House Record Club he briefly held years earlier served as the perfect setting for a clandestine film he made while still on the job about the Gen-X mentality he felt towards working for The Man. The release of said film acted as a springboard for Wilcha into the world of filmmaking, eventually leading him to produce a behind-the-scenes film on the making of director Judd Apatow’s 2009 effort “Funny People,” which would not only end up buried as a DVD extra but see Wilcha relocating his family across the country to finish this project. The move would soon become permanent, pushing him into a wealth of commercial film work for several major brands as life had its way with his family; before he knew it, a decade had passed, and his children were now mid-teens, leaving a stunned Wilcha to wonder where the years have gone. It’s here that the filmmaker decides to revisit an incomplete film he also let languish onto a hard drive set amongst so many others on a forgotten shelf, one about a decaying East Coast record store that employed Wilcha when he himself was but a youth and life was far more straightforward.
At this point, any pivoting that’s already transpired between the subjects of “The Flipside” starts to become more frequent, as talking-head interviews with additional former Flipside employees, film industry professionals and even Wilcha’s own parents find themselves set between the documentarian’s look back at other films that have also found a home on that same dusty shelf, from an understandably abandoned doc about an author with severe writer’s block to a live-action version of the legendary Ira Glass radio program “This American Life,” all the while periodically bringing in new faces to wax poetic on whatever the subject of the moment might be. In this sense, it’s no different from any other documentary but somehow manages to craft a compelling commentary about art and, through the time spent showcasing The Flipside, its owner, and even the competing shop across town, how the past seems to continually influence us, whether we like it or not. We’re even taken inside Wilcha’s childhood home from time to time, where a trip into the bedroom he once inhabited sees him extracting a hoard of artifacts from his younger years out from the recesses of a seemingly endless closet as his understandably frustrated father looks on. The same father, by the way, has a penchant for collecting himself, as seen in several scenes that follow him around the house and down the hallway of a hotel as shots of his mountainous stash of complimentary soaps and similar toiletries show a similar characteristic as that of his son.
Is “The Flipside” ultimately about The Flipside? The films Wilcha never gave the chance to see them cross the finish line? The sometimes eccentric characters who pop up periodically, such as former anarchist cable variety show host Uncle Floyd, who not only elicits more than a few chuckles every time he’s onscreen during several of his Flipside visits but also inadvertently gives Wilcha the opportunity to squeeze in footage capturing an outstanding David Bowie performance of a song the late musician once wrote about Floyd? It becomes evident as the film nears the end of its third act that, in keeping with the theme, there may not be a way to properly wrap up a movie of this sort, which couldn’t be more perfect if it tried; in making a movie about a perpetual lack of completion, “The Flipside” lives up to this in a triumphant way. Plus, if you thought there wouldn’t be an interesting way to reveal why The Flipside has contained the pungent smell of meat within its walls since the day its doors first opened, you’d be wrong.
As strange as it may be to admit, “The Flipside” is somehow a leap forward in the documentary genre, a supercut of nearly all the hallmarks of what it takes to make these sorts of films as much as what it takes to make them attractive. The assembly of the film takes the scattershot nature of the storyline and brings it all together for a movie that, as the credits roll, allows the revelation to set in that what was just witnessed made all the sense in the world. With “The Flipside,” Chris Wilcha has tried to do everything and not only succeeds but can safely say it’s finished. [A-]
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