Pearblossom Highway (2012, Dir. Mike Ott):
As a screenwriter (more daydream than actual goal), I sometimes encounter an indie film that makes me think, “I would love to have this director take a crack at my script.” Such was my reaction when I saw Littlerock (2010), Mike Ott’s striking first feature, and one of my surprise faves from the 2010 San Francisco International Film Festival. Gritty yet delicate, attuned to the dislocation of its central characters (Cory Zacharia and Atsuko Okatsuka) and its locale (the wasteland north of L.A.), Littlerock was an unsparing look at twentysomething losers, drawing from Zacharia’s real-life travails and Okatsuka’s loneliness as a transplanted immigrant, but it also had real affection for them.
The evocatively titled Pearblossom Highway (the road leading out of Littlerock) continues the “road” trilogy with the same actors and a new story, and if Littlerock was bittersweet, Pearblossom is decidedly sour. Atsuko (Okatsuka) is stuck in Littlerock, turning tricks at a local truck stop to earn enough money to go home to Japan and see her ailing grandmother, while her pal Cory (Zacharia) films himself constantly in a futile attempt to get on a reality TV show, fronts a noise band that is most definitely not heading places, struggles with his sexuality and nurses the idea of reconciling with his estranged father, all of which annoy his Marine vet brother (John Brotherton) to no end. There’s a lot of talk, much of it leading nowhere, whether it’s the natterings of Atsuko’s johns, or Cory’s deluded ramblings about his dreams and hopes. Although everyone wants to get “out of the desert,” it’s clear that no matter where our protagonists go, their wasteland of dry earth and dingy bars will stick to them like dust.
It doesn’t sound too different from what happens in Littlerock, and like that film, much of the story was created from Zacharia’s real-life circumstances at the time of the shoot, but the alchemy that resulted in the first film seems to have eluded Ott this time around. Pearblossom Highway is that classic “difficult second album,” and it also has the unfortunate result of reframing one’s perspective about Littlerock, which in hindsight now seems to be more a lucky confluence of filmmaker, place and story rather than the result of a coherent sensibility. In his tendency to over-think and over-talk, Zacharia is an amazing camera subject, but the sweetness of his character from Littlerock has given way to self-pity; the film meanders to a standstill with him, and one can sense Ott filming with clenched teeth, all too aware that this ne’er-do-well has become a parody of the lovable loser he seemed to be in the first film (at one point, Zacharia breaks the fourth wall to complain about his character, suggesting that this is all a put-on). Okatsuka’s performance is on the other end of the spectrum as she sulks her way through (thankfully, her prostitute subplot is completely fictional) — loneliness is her defining and sole characteristic.
More story-driven and somehow more aimless than Littlerock, Pearblossom is also a more dissonant affair (major transitions are punctuated by jarring clanging noises that Ott says were inspired by Godard) but it does feature some nifty low-budget camerawork, including a multitude of shots of Atsuko on reflective surfaces, and when our trio of misfits makes an unexpected roadtrip to the streets of San Francisco set to the opera “Samson” by Saint-Saens, the movie approaches the scruffy grace that Littlerock had. Much like an oasis in the desert though, the moment passes, and we’re left with a failed father-son reunion and an unanswered phone call, the story sputtering to a stop with a dreamless night ahead. It’s not a crime for a film to be different from its predecessor, and it will be interesting to see if Ott can get out of the desert himself and reinvigorate his filmmaking, but it doesn’t make Pearblossom, which sits at the uneasy intersection between empathy and condescension for its subjects, easier to sit through.
