Deep breath and … there’s no missing the outrageous ambition behind whatever Mike Cuenca‘s latest effort is, I’ll Be Around a deceptively meandering hodgepodge of dozens upon dozens of people collectively converging on a post-punk music festival having scattered conversations and commentary on life, music, misery, sex, dating, drugs, fame, art, friendship, social hysteria, and, well, you name it. It’s two hours and three minutes of “what am I watching?” made on a budget just large enough to buy a new pair of shoes. It’s got no point you’ll most likely take away from it though there are those who will most assuredly believe it has all the points. I think I’m in the middle swimming to an unfamiliar shore.
Okay, that out of my system … there is a larger message, that dreams are easy to have but nearly impossible to make come true, most of these 30-something musical artists and such wanna-be’s struggling to get any kind of attention and hoping a spot at the festival will do the trick. The story follows the last full day before the event as bunches of bands, singers, fans, and holdouts collide in the streets inside and outside telling their side of the fight in a kind of patchwork assembly line of odd characters and odder complexities. You never really know any of them but you understand their situations.
It’s maddening at first as the film jumps from person to person, group to group in an opening high-speed salvo that sort of introduces us to the myriad faces we’ll revisit over and over again for the duration, and a few stand out, as their threads eventually find some connection. It’s rigidly purposeful in its absurdity, which admittedly, given some time, becomes its driving charm, the guerilla film style and machine gun pace eventually loading the experience with a kind of unhinged investment. It’s like an old goofy MTV reality show clinging to its inflexible formula but updated for the modern anxiety-riddled crowd. No one seems real but all feel somewhat identifiable.
Clearly, this is a project for a certain kind of people, and there are faces and names these people will recognize more than others, not to mention the lifestyle and desires all of it shines a light on (or douses in darkness). Cuenca doesn’t flinch in painting the hardships and consequences of success and failure as much as the hopes and aspirations, but the film is so scattershot in its presentation, it’s hard to stay affected by any of it. That’s not even getting to the overall overdrawn performances of most of the cast who keep this ten steps from anything authentic. And because everyone is like that, I suspect this was a conscious choice.
So, that all said, which really ought to be read as wholesale subjective information dumping, I’ll Be Around is a unique work and Cuenca is looking to take his audience on a journey rather than tell a cohesive story, not so much trying to break the rules but simply avoiding them. In fact, if there’s anything that does it right, it’s Cuenca’s direction and restraint in delivering a film that wants nothing to do with restraint. He concentrates on the characters instead of the world they live in, allowing them to shape our interpretation of it rather than loads of exploitive imagery that might distract. This is a film that demands you wait for a payoff, like looking at a spilled box of puzzle pieces and trying to discern what it is from a single glance. Not possible. You need time and a little effort. That’s I’ll Be Around.