Marfa Girl 2 – the unlikely sequel to life on a dusty Texas border town – returns us to the life and times and teens and their families failing their way through the elemental moments of a life.
In this terse and short-lived sequel (the film clocks in just over an hour) you get it all: pissing cock, furry vaginas and bad complexions. Clark is interested in the unreserved experience of adolescence in every way it comes, seen through a cinematic lens. The verité performances are always a welcome respite from the the slick hair-shine aplomb of the MCU plague (with all respects to Mr. Lee).
The deceptively off the-cuff-style still belies is constructed nature, using only essential dialogue and beats. Undoubtedly there is a mountain of footage that ends up on the cutting room floor. These films create the very experience they are pretending to recreate. Nothing in cinema can get you much closer to the true feeling of sweat and vertigo of making it through days, with all the shit that drags along with it than a Clark film and he has only improved on the method.
As Clark states: “I don’t try to be controversial, I just try to be honest and tell the truth about life. Coming from the art world, I never think there are things you can’t do or show. I think that Hollywood films are really underestimating their audience. I’ve been an artist for many, many years. I’m not interested in making films to make money. I’m interested in making work that I’m satisfied with, showing people’s lives that aren’t shown. If I could see this anywhere else, I wouldn’t have to make these films.”
This is visceral work, literally warts and all. You can often feel the actors pushing their way through the improv, seeking, faltering, but the filmmakers find the beats – editors and Affonso Goncalves and Margaret Reville have done a tremendous job with pacing and capturing the moments. They may capture a hand on a thigh, a sunray on a pockmarked face, the wide open eyes of an infant, as the inexorable pace hammers on. So many cues afforded through these nuanced inserts. The angles, the music.
But this never feels like exploitation; it’s looking at childcare, unemployment, mental illness and substance abuse, crime, loyalty and obligation, domestic violence in an uncompromising way.
Marfa Girl 2 cinematographer David Newbert uses a high key lighting approach to look unflinchingly at these 17-years-old coming-of-age and falling face first into adult obligations – from raising children to paying the rent. These are raw vignettes strung together in emotional sequence.
Mary Farley, who has the unusual job of playing the only adult in the entire film, is unfiltered and unafraid, driving of line of reason through a human wasteland. Drake Burnette, who plays the titular Marfa, gives a chilling monologue center-piece that is just so full of abandon and provocation as to burn indelibly into the mind. And yet she is almost secondary to the many stories colliding here. Until the terrifying outcome makes itself known.
In an era of frightening cultural gentrification and thought inoculation, Marfa Girl 2 is essential viewing.