Contemporary indie cinema may lack in quality, but it absolutely does not lack in the quantity of up-and-coming filmmakers majorly taking inspiration from the grainy grittiness of ‘70s New Hollywood cinema. Mix it up with a dash of Dogme 95 grunge, squeeze the mandated quota of queerness into it, and voila!: you have a crime cocktail so bland and uninspired (despite being heavily inspired) that all it makes you want to do is press charges against those who served it.
Of course, there are exceptions to this: see, for instance, the Safdie Brothers’ viscerally unnerving Good Time (2017), featuring one of the seediest characters in Connie Nikkas (Robert Pattinson), a low-life hustler moving at a break-neck pace through the colorfully lit hellhole of New York City’s underworld to try and get money to bail his brother out of jail. Or, well, another Safdie Brothers’ rollercoaster ride — Uncut Gems (2019) — featuring one of the smarmiest characters in Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a jewelry store owner and gambling addict moving, at a break-neck pace, through the colorfully lit hellhole of New York City’s betting world to try and get the money to bail himself out. Both these films thrum (and thrill) with a life of their own because they draw upon their high-octane Martin Scorsese inspirations to create something new from them. Connie and Howard are flesh-and-blood characters in their respective films, idiosyncratic not only because of what their actors bring to them, but because the Safdie Brothers construct them as real people, not as a collection of convenient clichés.
Olmo Schnabel — son of filmmaker/painter Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, At Eternity’s Gate) — may make a film later in his career that achieves this. But his debut feature, Pet Shop Days, is unfortunately and positively devoid of any of it. It may look like a ‘70s film — cinematographer Hunter Zimny shot it on 16mm — that’s been updated for a queer audience — the affair between the aggressive Alejandro (Darío Yazbek Bernal) and the submissive Jack (Jack Irv) plays out a bit like Bonnie and Clyde set inside NYC’s underworld. But apart from the film grain, which lends the film some textural legitimacy, nothing else about Pet Shop Days feels legitimate.
Indeed, the camerawork is arguably the only interesting thing to be found here, and even that is, at best, derivative and, at worst, distastefully ostentatious. Sean Price Williams’ collaborations with Abel Ferrara and Anthony Dod Mantle’s Dogme 95 work appear to be Schnabel and Zimny’s key inspirations. The former makes sense, for Schnabel’s film, like Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones (2021), is about characters falling into a world of danger and uncertainty. However, the overuse of hard shadows was pushed to experimental extremes in that film to compensate for its lack of everything else; it was Ferrara’s portrait of a world crumbling under pre-vaccine Covid. There’s absolutely no reason for the nighttime scenes in Pet Shop Days — a film that not only has the most conventional lovers-on-run plot, but which entirely relies on the performances of its two central characters to create sympathy for them — to appear this dark; it only undermines whatever both actors are trying to bring in those scenes to their otherwise grossly underdeveloped parts.
Which begs the question: Do Schnabel and his two other credited screenwriters, Jack Irv (the film’s second lead) and Galen Core, really even care about anyone — especially the women — in their movie? Granted, they aren’t making a film about women; it’s about two bisexual mama’s boys (one’s mama is dead until she isn’t, and the other’s is getting there) having a bit of an Oedipal Complex before they find each other and decide it’s better to fuck each other than, well, other women. By and large, they’re rendered as accessories to the men, then. But does that mean the camera also treats them as such? There’s a particularly unforgivable, genuinely loathsome low-angle extreme close-up shot that leers at a (nameless) sex worker’s posterior as she’s seated on a glass table, negotiating the terms and conditions of having a threesome with our two leading men. We hardly know anything about her, and will hardly get to know anything about her beyond this. But Schnabel and Zimny, for some unknown and ill-conceived reason, make the decision to throw in a shot that functions only to objectify this woman. To be clear, this is not a POV shot from either of the men, one that might communicate how horned-up they are to have sex with her. It’s — for the lack of a better description — the filmmaker’s POV; Schnabel clearly perceives this as the most suitable shot to establish the person in the scene. The good news is that no other moment in Pet Shop Days is as distastefully repulsive as this, but that’s largely because nothing else of note happens in the film. But it does feature copious amounts of dipshit dads being half-assed dipshits to their dipshit sons. So, if that’s your thing, well, still skip this and (re)watch The Empire Strikes Back.
DIRECTOR: Olmo Schnabel; CAST: Jack Irv, Darío Yazbek, Willem Dafoe, Emmanuelle Seigner, Camille Rowe; DISTRIBUTOR: Utopia; IN THEATERS: March 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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