“The surfer” review: Nicolas Cage sets up the edge of madness

A sunny beach black looks like a contradiction until you sweat in the conscious sand of the bite into your eyes and the uncomfortable feeling that there is something that does not go with you, your life and how you live it. Why don't you have fun?

“The surfer”, directed by Lorcan Finnegan (“Vivarium”) and written by Thomas Martin, captures this picturesque discomfort and launches the heat until his own bright yellow retro title police seems to be sarcastic. It is a film in which the mythical crashes in the ridiculous, the intersection where his star Nicolas cage also marked his career. Playing an anonymous surfer stuck high and dry at the top of a dry parking lot, Cage looks at the waves below with the thirst of a beaten cartoon coyote. You half expect for seeing her students get out of her binocular lenses.

The action takes place all on a small place in ribs in the fictitious bay of Luna, Australia, where the character of Cage claims that he grew up before moving to California at the age of 15. His accent has no trace, but at least his skin is tanned with the same nuance of orange as her hair. Now a businessman dressed in linen combination, he has returned with his own teenage son (Hardly find) Shortly before Christmas with a certain paternal ocean wisdom. “You surf or are wiped out,” said Cage to his boy, philosophically.

The child is not impressed by him; Local surfing intimidators even less. Cage does not obtain a tide toe before it received the uprising by a pretentious group of quasi-spiritual surfers called The Bay Boys. The beach is public, insists Cage. Guru Scalley of the Bay Boys (Julian McMahon, Fantastic) is not moved. “Yeah, but no,” said Scalley and raises his shoulders, his cold that turns ice. A intimidating and happy life coach, Scalley promotes the power of male primary energy, although the film is quite warned to emphasize that he was also born rich and organizes an Instagram. Congratulations to a costume privilege see Leong for McMahon equipment in a poncho in hooded terry fabric which makes him look like Jesus crossed the water to hang ten.

“The surfer” has a plot that you could tell in 30 seconds. First, Cage will not leave and then it can't Go – and then he can do nothing without the Bay Boys making him suffer. (“Suffering” and “surfer”, underlines the script of Martin, are only an interval letter.) The film is inspired by a Real surfing gang of the Palos Verdes peninsulaBut all from pace to performance has been amplified in absurdity. A minute never goes by without the cage circumstances getting worse. His insistence to stay on the spot the facts to sacrifice an object of status after the other – his phone, his shoes, his car – and it does not take long before he boxs and unleashes himself and squat next to the packaging of condoms while the men pursue him with Tiki torches. Luna Bay pushes lunatic people. Everything is built towards the same tsunami of rage.

Cage has been on a sequence for manufacturing catchy budgets B-Films Going up filmmakers such as “PIG”, “Dream scenario” and “the unbearable weight of massive talents”. It is a brilliant approach: its fame interesting projects of the ground and, in turn, it becomes the greatest thing in them. Not all films work, but enough of them, especially those who promise violence – that it offers, but not the way you might think. Most of the “surfer” damage are mental; We are imbued with the cage descent. It would make an excellent double functioning with the 1968 of Burt Lancaster “The swimmer”, “ Another hallucinatory psychodrama on a brainwashed scrambled downhill.

The boys of the tribalistic bay deserve scrambled sea urchin spikes stuck in their toes. You manage to hate their enviable ease, the pink zinc cream lying on their noses, their stirring tongues and their fingers in the middle. (They even sabotage the water fountain, just like General Aquillius of Rome, Aquillius, would have poisoned the wells of his enemy.) Their giant smiles and bogus reminded me of the dolphins who turned their prey and their average laugh is mixed in the sound of the birds of the Cackling. I think the film knows that the gang calls the boys of the bay – the same as the real Californians – is a limited idea of ​​cool. It is difficult for the characters to say it with threat. More disturbing is the way everyone simply accepts these guys. Handwrite a woman laughs: “This prevents them from beating their women's Botox.”

The stake is our indignation that the beauty of this world has been requisitioned by people who act as if they had the planet. We would not also be invested if the stakes were private – say, a golf club or a closed community – although the cage character with his luxury car and his cost of expensive latte probably care about them too. He is not an honorable outsider, brushing a tramp (Nicholas Cassim) which begs him of the help. Cage does not want to match the rules of the game. He wants to belong or burn everything.

For him, this beach is personal. As a child, he played in this exact location. As a man (and there is more testosterone in this film than water in the peaceful ocean), it is desperate to buy the house of his grandfather on the cliff. These blue-green waves are his birth right. In phantasmagorical flashbacks, we learn that his family overturned blood in their foam. Now, this promise is moving away on time while guys with happier families and healthier muscles take his place. The sorrow in this film relates to anyone who has realized how difficult it is to go home, that it means a newly gentrified district or simply the safety of what a salary in the middle class allowed itself.

The sun and the sea are in each setting. Golden Light Dapples on the cage face. The airlines of water are used as stage wipes and their noise crashed underlines its psychic distress. Radek Ladczuk The work of psychedelic camera loves zooms and dramatic objectives that make bodies mix and distort, stressing what facility can someone drag comfortable to miserable, and the greatly mystical soundtrack of François Tétaz is wonderful, even if it uses enough wind cars to invoke Poseidon.

“Everything varies at this break -up,” says cage about waves. The audience hoping for a Gonzo bloodbath will be disappointed that Finnegan keeps its troubled morality. But that's the right choice. This has bugs like “the surfer” intends to make the film at home like sand in your shoes.