movie review: Butterfly Kisses

I've devoted a lot of blog entries to "found footage" films, dating back to before the term was even in common use. Found footage may have existed before The Blair Witch Project was released in 1999, but that's the movie that, for better or worse, put found footage on the map.

Film scholars have observed that genres tend to follow the same pattern of certain stages of development. The third stage is "Revisionist," described by Tim Dirks as "a reinterpretation, recasting, or questioning of the original genre, with greater complexity of themes while retaining many of its characteristics and iconographic elements." Director/ writer Erik Christopher Myers seemed to be studying that definition intensely while making Butterfly Kisses.

Like The Blair Witch Project and so many other found footage films, Butterfly Kisses whole-heartedly encourages its viewers to constantly wonder whether the found footage is authentic or an artistic creation of the filmmakers. The set-up is yawningly familiar to anyone who has seen The Blair Witch Project or any of its countless imitators: film students set out to make a documentary about an urban legend, and disappear without a trace during the making of their film. Years later, their footage has been found and assembled into a coherent movie, in an attempt to figure out what happened to them.

At this point, the description is so astoundingly yet boringly similar to The Blair Witch Project that it sounds like an uncredited remake. But wait! Neither the film students' disappearance, nor the urban legend that they were investigating are the subjects of this film, at least not directly. Instead, Butterfly Kisses is more interested in the story of Gavin York, the struggling semi-amateur filmmaker who discovered the box of tapes left behind by the missing students. Gavin decides to assemble the footage, to complete the project that the students started. Meanwhile, inspired by the discovery of the tapes, Gavin is also making a documentary about the students' disappearance.

But wait! We're not watching that documentary. We're watching a documentary about Gavin's attempts to make his movie. We are basically watching a documentary about a documentarian who is making a documentary about documentarians who were making a documentary. Call it over-complicated if you want, but you at least have to admit it's multi-layered.

As Gavin shows the footage to more and more people -- film experts, filmmakers, folklorists, even the general public -- he keeps hoping for authentication, for validation, but everywhere he looks, people are skeptical and dismiss his project as a hoax. The more generous are willing to admit that maybe Gavin's on the level, but speculate that he got duped by hoax footage left behind by the students. Others accuse Gavin himself of faking the whole thing, especially the footage that seems to actually document existence of "Blink Man," a.k.a. "Peeping Tom," the subject of the original urban legend investigated by the now missing students.

No one in the movie can agree exactly how the footage was faked, but everyone except Gavin seems to agree that it was indeed faked. Reactions range from admiration of Gavin's technique, to outrage at his alleged attempt to fool people, to sympathetic attempts to explain to Gavin that he himself seems to be the only one falling for an "obvious" fake made by the students. Even the fact that no one can seem to find the students is at once seen by Gavin as evidence of the footage's authenticity, and by everyone else as proof that the whole thing is made up. Even Eduardo Sanchez, one of the two filmmakers who made The Blair Witch Project himself, shows up in an interview complaining about the legitimacy of the whole project.

But this isn't parody. It's an examination not only of Peeping Tom, students Feldman and Sophie, and hapless, increasingly frustrated filmmaker Gavin, but also an examination on the strengths and weaknesses of the "found footage" genre itself. Out of all the found footage films I've watched, this is perhaps the most convincing in its "is it real or isn't it?" dilemma. Of course, I know whether it's real. But that's not really the point anymore. I guess it hasn't been the point in a long, long time.