Dec 4: The provocative puzzles of Adam Pinney’s ‘The Arbalest’

The award-winning surreal period dramedy closes out the 2016 calendar year for Micro-Wave Cinema

Enigmatic toy puzzle-cube architect Foster Kalt (Mike Brune)’s intense, unrequited feelings for a severe woman (Tallie Medel) who openly hates him is the motivation for the curvy course of Adam Pinney’s directorial feature debut. The Arbalest had its world premiere this Mar at SxSW in Austin where it claimed the Grand Jury Prize for Narrative Feature, and it screens in Madison on Dec 4 at 7:00p in 4070 Vilas Hall as the final Micro-Wave Cinema Series presentation of the fall semester. Pinney will join host and curator Brandon Colvin for a video Q&A afterward.

While the base premise sounds positively Seinfeldian, the film’s tone takes a more cerebral turn as the reclusive Kalt reflects upon his celebrity. With eager investigative journalists and television news crews at his side in the late 1970s, Kalt prepares to unveil a grand new invention that promises to reference the film’s title. However, the story then skips back a decade to 1968 when he first took the world by storm; or rather, when he claimed credit for design of the cube after a strange series of events and some persuasion by his competitor’s mysterious partner, Sylvia (Medel). The alluring young dealmaker instantly becomes the object of Kalt’s oppressive affections, surveillance, and the predominant focus through the miles and years, as the toy tycoon steadily slips into a drug-fueled shame spiral.

Shot on 16mm, embellished by a saturated palette of pastel colors, and Thomas Barnwell and Ian Deaton’s ambient-electronic and acoustic guitar score, The Arbalest effectively harnesses a simultaneous wistfulness and paranoia that pervades Kalt’s tribulations. The trailer-emphasized pull quote from Matthew Jacobs of Huffington Post essentially calls the costume dramedy the stylistic lovechild of Wes Anderson and David Lynch, while Jason Coffman of Daily Grindhouse directs his praise more specifically towards Medel’s hilariously deadpan performance. New Yorker critic Richard Brody’s observations are maybe most flattering, as he lauds Pinney’s vision as “historical fantasy of high style, composed dramatically and visually with a shot-by-shot profusion of imagination and invention.”

  • The Arbalest screens on Sun, Dec 4, in 4070 Vilas Hall at 7:00p. Admission is FREE and open to the public. A video Q&A with director Adam Pinney will follow. For more information on the Micro-Wave Cinema Series, visit their Facebook community page.