Flooding with Love for the Kid

Flooding with Love for the Kid

107 Minutes

Flooding with Love for the Kid is one of the strangest movies I’ve seen, a one-man adaptation of First Blood, David Morrell’s 1972 novel and the source of the Rambo series, shot on a simple video camera by one person in a studio apartment. The high concept has a certain gravitational pull by sheer virtue of its wackiness – a one-man cinematic war, shared by filmmaker and character alike – but it’s one that makes you (or, made me) apprehensive at first, ready to expect nothing more from it than a gimmicky comedy. The biggest challenge Flooding faces is perceptual; getting an audience to engage with it as a movie and not a concept. The approach shouldn’t be thought of as a “gimmick,” even though Zachary Oberzan, the film’s sole performer and creator, does allow himself (and us) to find it pretty funny.

Flooding is really special because it requires a certain degree of engagement from its audience that is entirely unique to it. It eases you in to that mode; the story starts slowly and allows you to adjust your imagination to the film’s production values and style for a while, setting up the scenario and characters. Oberzan’s visual imagination allows him to transform his environment and person in a variety of ways, and although the film is largely stationary, there are some brilliant moments of montage and prop use that transform the space into a cliff side, a jail cell, the forest, and turns a couple chairs and a fan into a helicopter. The constructed nature of the world is never lost, but this doesn’t hamper the story’s effectiveness. The film’s success, in fact, is surprising. It effectively strips narrative films down to their base elements – a strong story and performances, a couple representative props and the Kuleshov Effect are all you really need to make a convincing piece of work. Anyone interested in filmmaking would benefit greatly from watching it and considering the things it reveals.

An unnamed drifter wanders into town and is immediately hassled by the sheriff, Teasle, for his vagrant appearance, then escorted out to the town limits. Offended by this treatment, he resolves to come back and the situation senselessly escalates into a high-body-count manhunt in the forests surrounding the town. Faithfully adapted from the novel in a way that the original, Stallone-starring First Blood was not, the lines between the comedy and the actual story you’re watching start to blur; you find the movie sinking its hooks in you, and on comes the gradual realization that, even in complete coexistence with its distractingly (and self-consciously) comic production values, Flooding is still working effectively as a moving psychological thriller, and a really strong one at that.

More centered around cat and mouse dynamics than out and out explosive action, the story is about a series of misunderstandings that come wholly from a lack of engagement on either party’s behalf with the other. Teasle has no idea that Rambo is a Vietnam War veteran until it’s too late; Rambo underestimates Teasle’s volatility, unaware of his simmering matrimonial stress. They both continue to surprise each other and both of them continue to fail to learn anything from the experience – we don’t find out Rambo’s name or war experience until a good hour into the movie, we don’t find out the full nature of Teasle’s marital problems until even later.

These revelations are moving because they’re obviously significant for each man, but only the audience is capable of empathizing with either of them, so we experience the full extent of their mistakes, while they propel themselves carelessly towards their demises. It goes to show how little these two men know about each other’s situations, how foundationless their conflict actually is and how crazy they both are. This is enhanced by the execution of Flooding, which visually solidifies the implication that Rambo and Teasle are reflections of one another, both traumatized and irreversibly changed by their war experiences, by having them be played by the same actor.

At the end, Teasle experiences a spiritual bond with Rambo within his mind and, near death, convinces Trautman, a military man responsible for “creating” him, that they need to destroy one another out of mutual respect and love. “He wants me there!” he keeps shouting, and with such conviction that it becomes conceivable he could “know” it. Frenzied, he hurries towards him and Rambo shoots him in the gut. “I didn’t want this!” The issue of communication is reflected structurally in the film’s natural disjointedness – it forces you to take the time to listen and pay attention, to fill in the blanks and be a part of the story. If you don’t, if you find yourself resistant to its execution on a gut level that you never get past, maybe the film’s vagrant looks don’t sit well with you and you don’t think it’s normal, you may just view it as an assault and hate it with all your heart; Rambo and Teasle in film and spectator form. In some way, the title, a reference to Teasle’s epiphanic moment at the end, is also an invocation on Oberzan’s part – you’ve got to be flooding with love for the kid.

by Andrei Alupului

Note: For screening information and DVD order info, go to Zachary Oberzan’s site – http://zacharyoberzan.com/