Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
The local phenomenon of Fantasy A Gets a Mattress continues this weekend; the Seattle-made film played a series of sold-out shows at the Beacon and runs now at the Grand Illusion and the Northwest Film Forum, the latter spot as part of NWFF's annual Local Sightings festival. My initial take follows.
"My city finally came through for me." So says Fantasy A toward the end of Fantasy A Gets a Mattress, and although much of the preceding 75 minutes has been daffy indeed—an extended low-budget goof from the wrong side of town—I must confess I found myself unexpectedly moved by this earnest declaration. But then Seattle is my city, too, which might have something to do with the way Fantasy A's humble wants—a mattress to sleep on, a landlord "who's not a rule monster"—resonate with my own disenchantment with a city that has stopped caring about people who don't fit into the go-go energy that began gaining speed and growing equity (I don't know what equity is) since, oh, around the mid-90s or so.
I don't mean that last sentence to sound maudlin, because this movie is anything but. Rife with drop-dead absurdism and savvy moviemaking (there is one specific camera adjustment, when Fantasy A takes on a determined look, that has true giddy greatness in it), Fantasy A Gets a Mattress is mostly dominated by the sincerity of its main character. He is Fantasy A, played by the Black autistic Seattle rapper of that name. Promoting himself through his colorful telephone-pole flyers (telephone-pole flyers, at least, didn't stop happening in the mid-90s), Fantasy A struggles to get by at his group home, where the rulebook house manager insists on a 4:30 pm curfew. Perhaps sort of benefit could raise money, especially if his pal and fellow artistic type Asia Rose (Acacia Porter) can drag her somewhat famous cousin Lil Rude Puss (whose alleged hit single, "Pony Milk," is frequently referenced) into the performance.
Directors David Norman Lewis and Noah Zoltan Sofian and producer/production designer Safiye Rose Senturk are scrappy in budget and style, stealthily achieving two notable ends. One is a portrait of a world that fails to serve the have-nots, a portrait that emerges not through scolding or somber documentary means (those would be more characteristic Seattle modes, unfortunately) but out of its knockabout comedy stylings. The other thing the movie does is create a city symphony, one of the best to come out of Seattle. There haven't been many of those; unless you count the bright, pop location shooting for the Elvis picture It Happened at the World's Fair, the closest thing is Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind, set in fictional Rain City, or Robinson Devor's Police Beat. The especially sweet thing is that the filmmakers capture this by avoiding postcard views—unless they have some irony built into them—and simply seeing, from the inside, the less affluent neighborhoods of our booming city. These worn storefronts and disheveled interiors are the playground of Fantasy A's driven existence, and we know them through his focused, insistent eyes.
"If I had one day that went well, I'd make it my new birthday and celebrate it every year." I don't know where the film's scruffy poetry comes from, but it fits the on-the-fly style overall. There may not be as many quotable lines here as in something like, say, Napoleon Dynamite, but there are enough dizzy non sequiturs to kindle cult status (and the movie has its own Uncle Rico in the form of the scheming Ramon, played by Logic Amen). This is a Seattle classic, in its own way, as though willed into existence by its fierce, hapless, indomitable hero.
September 15, 2023
Robert Horton is a member of the National Society of Film Critics.
