The unique coming-of-age/fantasy hybrid plays Fri, Nov 13, at 7:00p, with an in-person appearance from Meyerhoff
Including a title-inspiring solo rendition of The Unicorns’ “I Was Born (A Unicorn),” writer-director Leah Meyerhoff’s breezy feature-length debut fully embraces its whimsy and flights of fancy in order to transform them. Poured through the hopeless romantic consciousness of artistic 16 year-old Davina (Natalia Dyer), I Believe in Unicorns‘ out-of-time excursions into the off-roads of California are augmented through an interplay of coming-of-age tropes punctuated by poetic handheld cinematography and Josh Mahan’s stop-motion animation, paralleling the stages of first love with an older rebellious soul, who she initially dreams to be her prince charming.
Although it takes influence from diverse cinematic sources, including Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988), Black Moon (1975), King of California (2007), The Last Unicorn (1982), Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), and Sun Don’t Shine (2012) [by Amy Seimetz, who curiously has a cameo turn here as Davina’s photography teacher, Clara], the film actually develops an uncanny correlation with Dontnod’s recent episodic game, Life is Strange (2015), which chronicles teenage photographer and analog media advocate, Maxine Caulfield (voiced by Hannah Telle), through a similar aesthetic pastiche and feminist psychology. While the set up to Meyerhoff’s vision threatens to fall into the threadbare girl-meet-boy scenario, its independent spirit, meticulous craftsmanship, and autobiographical detail refreshingly break from well-trodden origins.
The film plunges us instantly into the turbulent emotional state of Davina through a piano-driven lullaby by Sasha Gordon over an intimate series of super 8mm home movies of bygone birthday celebrations. These are intercut with distinctively twee mixed media animations fizzling out into the humdrum reality of current home life with her wheelchair-bound single parent (Toni Meyerhoff, the director’s mother) plagued by multiple sclerosis. After school, Davina confides in friend Cassidy (Julia Garner) about her pining for a shaggy-haired skate-punker, Sterling (Peter Vack), who instantly bonds with Davina over a desire to flee broken homes through playful fantasy ritual.
In a foreshadowing slo-mo scene of mantric voiceover dialogue juxtaposed with the ecstatic high of trampoline-bouncing, the courtship begins in a microcosmic fantasy narrative that runs parallel to their reality, planting the seeds of destruction. As Davina angelically re-invents herself, “I will spread my wings and smother you with a million tiny feathers,” Sterling retaliates with a harsher gesture: “I’ll light your feathers on fire and watch them turn to ash.” The couple’s new-found freedom, unbound from the few relationships that have tethered them to their NorCal community, liberates their travels from predictable course, especially as Davina becomes acutely aware of the threat of violence. She combats her beau’s dark side through the embrace of a childhood wonderment in role-playing. Ordinary knickknacks that populated the title sequence also take on mythical qualities as a pinwheel, balloons, miniature plastic dinosaurs, and a squirt gun become talismans on her journey.
The white unicorn in the narrative clearly comes to signify Davina’s innocence but in other junctures also seems to be an elusive metaphor for Sterling’s persona. Following an openly passionate love scene, Davina recites a tale in voiceover about a maiden hypnotizing a unicorn she’s lured into a forest, thus taming its ferocity. This may provoke thematic confusion, but it also speaks to the fragile spontaneity of Davina’s imagination. It’s this emotional tumult that compels her to continue to chase Sterling on the journey westward “into the setting sun,” as she thinks of him as her partner in love, fantasy, and crime; yet, she fears his intensity and easy incitement to intimidation. Despite their significant age difference, both Dyer and Vack believably convey the complications of a relationship predicated upon unrealistic expectation. And in the film’s ugliest moments, Meyerhoff’s triumphant message pertains to the manifold nature of fantasy with the potential to delude and disguise as well as inspire and awaken one to the horrors of unchecked carnal aggression to thwart the cancerous black dragon with a blazing, self-actualizing arrow.
With a plethora of recent coming-of-age tales helmed by men, concerning boys and girls alike, I Believe in Unicorns‘ decidedly feminine alliance offers a collaborative forum for several generations of women both on the screen and in post-production. Meyerhoff will be the Marquee Film Festival’s first-ever guest speaker; in addition to a post-screening Q&A on Nov 13, she will appear the following afternoon, Nov 14, at 12:00p, in the Marquee Theater to lecture on advocacy for women in film and television, for which she has created the Film Fatales, a global network of female filmmakers committed to further the creation of media by and about women.
- I Believe in Unicorns is presented by WUD Film as part of the Marquee Film Festival, which we’re covering with Madison Film Forum all week. Admission is FREE.