Part of the reason I wanted to see Frownland was because the ICA, who are showing the film right now this very moment (and throughout July), seduced me with stories of how “Frownland has garnered passionate raves and scathing denunciation, while festival screenings have ended in screaming matches between patrons”.
Frownland is about a New Yorker called Keith who can’t ever spit out what he wants to say and uses his oven door as a dining table to eat popcorn. To be honest, not much happens as we watch him stumble through his grim life. Director Ronald Bronstein called the film “an overripe tomato lobbed with spazmo inaccuracy at the spotless surface of the silver screen”, and after seeing the film, that almost makes sense. I like Frownland a lot, and I called up Bronstein to find out where this madness came from.
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Vice: Hi Ronnie, how are you?
Ronnie Bronstein: I’m doing ok, I think. Yeah, yeah I’m alright.
What are you doing?
Oh, I’m just pacing up and down the street, just clearing my head, just trying to clear some space to talk about this particular project I guess. It’s not easy for me, you know. I’m just trying to push this thing as far back in the rear view mirror as I possibly can. You know, whenever it plays somewhere new, for anybody in the functioning world it’s a brand new movie, so I should speak with the enthusiasm of someone who’s just finished making it. That’s what I’m going to try to do. How are you?!
Does it bother you to talk about it still, have you had enough of it?
That’s a good question. I guess I see the arc of a project being a slow steady descent from arrogance into just abject self-doubt or self-disgust, so by the end of finishing something you’re just a slithering spineless worm with no confidence in the work. So at that point to speak about it is incongruous to how I feel about it. There’s no confidence just in having finished the work, to me it’s just a testament to gross failure in lots of weird ways that hopefully aren’t apparent in the work itself.
You must have had a confidence from the positive reviews you’ve been getting.
That’s true, but it’s a double-edged sword. I’ve received plenty of negative ones too. Good reviews make me feel good for as long as it takes for me to forward them to my mother. And critics are one thing, but in terms of audience response there’s been a lot of hostility. Treating me as if it is was my intention to upset them for its own sake, without any deeper moral value underneath it, and it’s not my intention to do that. I get no joy out of harassing someone who wouldn’t be open to this kind of work. I wasn’t trying to piss anyone off. I’m as far from as an enfant terrible as you can get. I’m an overly sensitive 36-year-old man.
There are a couple of films around at the moment which feature dysfunctional, lonely men, Cyrus , and particularly Greenberg .
Yeah, the loveable loser genre: Movies that think of themselves as idiosyncratic, in that they’re willing to focus on antiheroes, or protagonists who are not heroic. But, and I haven’t seen those two films and I’m generalising, the problem with loveable loser movies is that those characters are very nakedly designed to appeal to the loser in all of us. And there’s something really repulsive to me about allowing a movie to manipulate me in that particular way. To go into a movie theatre and for two hours to allow myself to think I’m more tolerant of weakness than I will be the second I leave that movie theatre and run into some neurotic ne’er-do-well in the bathroom. That certainly wasn’t where I was coming from with this film. For a movie to really lead an audience to a place of genuine compassion, you have to risk losing that person entirely, to lose audience identification, so that there’s a working through process. To love someone is to hate them. If you were to break down love you’d find resentment, anger, disgust. All these things are just natural by-products of getting close to another person.
Those two films I mentioned, and I like them both, are both about slightly dysfunctional middle-aged man-children, but they’re both very accessible romantic comedies, ultimately. Whereas I think your film is the real deal, about a real outsider who a lot of people wouldn’t want to hang out with. Although I liked him.
Me too. For me the movie constantly pivots around these two states of knee-jerk intolerance and heartbreaking sympathy. But I don’t know if the movie is a humanistic work as much as it’s me indicting myself of my own misanthropy and intolerance.
What was the starting point, where did it come from?
I really wasted my 20s; I was so steeped in self-consciousness and insecurity. I realised I wanted to make some work about that lack of confidence, then lied my way into a copywriting job in Sweden which allowed me to at least pay for what I thought would be a budget for the movie. Then I bumped into [actor] Dore Mann at a family funeral, and realised he would be a better conduit for the emotions I wanted to portray than I would.
Was he an actor?
He’s not an actor. He’s a genius. He’s a performer, an incredibly resourceful person. The character is a result of certain tendencies that he has. When I met him he was living with his mother, didn’t seem to have much social contact, was working in a supermarket, and when I met him it was like I had taken an axe and smashed a padlock over his lips, it was like everything he ever wanted to say fell and tumbled out of his mouth at once. But also there are so many other qualities he has that didn’t fit the film. The character was custom built around him, his psychic rhythms, his speech patterns, but it’s not him. People think he must be this guy, which I think was very off-putting to him. He now takes great pride in the movie, although I’m completely estranged from him.
Why?
It’s so complicated, the most complex relationship I’ve ever had in my life; I don’t know how I would distill it into a soundbite. But at the beginning he didn’t want to come to screenings, he was afraid of guilt by association.
So what are you working on now?
I’m shooting a film in the fall. It’s completely different, I think it’s funnier because the character is so spastic and rubbery and gregarious, but it’s so steeped in self-disgust, I panic every night before I got to work on it again. I just dread working on it because it’s such ugly stuff, ugly people with problems that can’t be solved. Ugh. Anyway.
