It’s weird. The whole thing. And I’m gonna get wishy-washy on this. Perhaps that’s the point, writer and director Robert G. Putka wanting his audience to feel like they themselves are in limbo, unsure what to think. That’s the takeaway for his latest film Mister Limbo, a hard-to-define independent release that I really wanted to like but never felt connected with. Maybe that’s my fault, its jackhammer approach to existentialism leaving me distant from its intended effects.
It opens on a young man (Hugo de Sousa) waking in the desert, apparently crashing after his parachute failed. Thing is, he doesn’t remember. He tries to orient himself, then starts walking, finding first an old public telephone partially buried in a dune. Then he finds a man (Vig Norris) in a bathrobe and yellow rubber wading boots. Neither man knows what their own names are, unsure how they got there or where to go. As they walk on, they come upon others and it becomes clear that they are in purgatory, on a journey, left to reflect on who they were and what comes next.
That’s an old thread to weave a new story on and Putka attempts to keep it fresh but he’s got little to work with having his characters lost in a desert with nothing to do but talk and occasionally run into others who all seem to be of a more accepting mind to their predicament. Naturally, the two men bond and find friendship as they discuss the reality that God or whomever is holding them for review. They must wonder, are they worthy?
With its simple setup, Mister Limbo really feels like it might have played better as a short film, though I give Putka credit for working in as much as he did. De Sousa and Norris do have some quality moments that find the right tone, but while surely a script guided the actors, it has a strong improvisational vibe about it that often comes across forced and without direction. More so, Putka sometimes lets his camera wander about with a kind of unsteadiness that became distracting by the end. However, as critical as this sounds, I did find several shots particularly striking, and Putka does have a good eye for visual storytelling. The first ten minutes are fantastic.
I told you, wishy-washy. What do I really feel, right? A film like is built on ambiguity and that’s exactly where it takes you, refusing to label anything but leaving it up for the viewer to decide, even as the ending brings into play some obvious symbolism about the directions these men will go. However, I wish the commitment to that would have been more subtle. There’s a moment mid-way through where the men meet a trio sitting in the sun, and one woman (Jennifer Antoinette Kennedy) offers them drugs, repeating the phrase “everything is everything” over and over and over as the camera flickers and blurs, and I’m thinking I should be drawing something from this, that it must bind to a message, that I should feel like these three words will be the connective tissue to what this means. Perhaps one could say it does, that this is the point Putka is making. However it did not for me. Oddly, I would say this might be an interesting double feature with Gus Van Sant‘s equally maddening Gerry.