★★                  By Z.P. Kibbleworth               July 29, 2089

Two figures stand silhouetted against the burning remains of Harmonia Prime. Buildings go up in bright pink flame. The smoke billows all the way up to the station’s oxygen membrane and reflects off of it, creating a shimmering across the sky that lights the sides of our characters’ faces. They stand holding each other on a tall balcony, watching as marauders rampage the streets of their home below. One is Gracie, the film’s heroine, played by Mimi Gobbleswein, who says in a teary lilt, “I just don’t see why it all had to be this way.” The other is Hunculus Mantiple IV, played by Zayn Poché, who responds, “I think I understand now. It’s like this constipation I’ve had for the past few months. I keep trying to push my feelings for you out, just like I’ve been trying to push out that poop. But I can’t. Because it’s a part of me.” He looks at her, and a single tear rolls down his cheek. Then, just as the row of buildings behind them explodes in perfect coordination, they kiss. The camera spins around them frantically as the musical score blasts a series of ear-splitting chords from a pipe organ. The shot is intercut with brief clips of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For some reason, there are now doves circling the pair. It’s a moment showing the full potential of cinema’s bravado, and also one that makes utterly no sense. This conjunction of magnificence and cluelessness is what characterizes The Eunuch’s Accordion as a whole.

The Eunuch’s Accordion is the latest film from Icelandic director Cheese Shotgun, whose previous feature – It’s Arbor Day, Fuckers – won the Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival. Following that film’s success, Mr. Shotgun pivoted from his well-known forte of sexploitation films with strong leftist political commentary to the world of prestige epic, with The Eunuch’s Accordion being a fictionalized account of the 2051 failed anticolonial uprising on the Martian moon Phobos. Anticipation has run high for the film, with many excited to see how Mr. Shotgun would apply his skills to a blockbuster film, and also excited that the film is self-financed and produced without the oversight of a major studio. (Many have inquired into the source of the film’s massive budget, with some speculating that it comes largely from the family connections Mr. Shotgun has to the interplanetary crime syndicate Chombos 29.) The result, however, is a film so intent on proving itself the next giant leap in cinema that it loses all sense of purpose and storytelling. Instead, it is the cinematic version of a child throwing all their favorite sugary foods into a recipe in hopes the result will be the greatest dessert of all. The film handles the history of the Phobos Rebellion, still a very raw cultural trauma for many Martians, with all the subtlety of a jackhammer.

At the center of the film’s perplexing elements is its attempted star turn from Mimi Gobbleswein, previously best known for her roles in numerous music videos for the Venusian band The Willywubbys. Ms. Gobbleswein is certainly doing her best here, but it’s hard to buy her as the fearless, unlikely leader of the underground resistance to the Earthling colonizers when she cannot deliver a monologue without appearing to stop every tenth word to remember the rest of the line. Mr. Poché, meanwhile, as her love interest Hunculus, a native Martian serving under the Earth Provisional Government, seems to think acting is nothing more than speaking under your breath with dramatic pauses between each word. Rounding out the main characters are Phobian chief Ancel Pilkins, played by Montello Martinucci, who probably needs to fire his agent and find roles worthy of his peculiar swagger, and his husband Cornelius, played by Sir Hugh Dryden, who is so transparently desperate to win his elusive Oscar that watching his performances just becomes depressing. Also with a role is rapper Fat Hemorrhoid, who is somehow in the film despite currently serving a 30-year sentence in prison for trafficking of illegal psychedelic Fruit Snacks. Finally, the film’s four-and-a-half-hour runtime is littered with smaller appearances by the likes of Vikki Korba, Solomon Quiznos McGee, Zorglox Xhyrgz, Boo-Boo Sanchez, and Timothée Chalamet.

That the film is a work of pure passion from Cheese Shotgun and his collaborators is immediately obvious. Every scene, every shot is dripping with creative ideas attempting to push the film to be revolutionary; in fact, this is precisely the problem with the film. In his effort to make himself this century’s fusion of Quentin Tarantino and Andrei Tarkovsky, Mr. Shotgun seems allergic to tools as basic as shot/reverse shot and continuity editing, even in simple exposition scenes. It’s unfortunate that for all the work that clearly went into the film’s lavish sets, the camera cannot stay put long enough to allow us to take them in, instead darting back and forth, in and out of comprehensible angles as though it were strapped to the back of an overcaffeinated squirrel. The upshot for the film is that just by dint of its sheer maximality, it is bound to stumble into a few moments of true cinematic power, and certainly the loudness of all its creative choices demand your attention throughout. Dumbfounded as I was by whatever this movie is trying to do, I was certainly never bored.            

Even as devoid of any coherence or sanity as the film itself is, the fact that The Eunuch’s Accordion exists at all is encouraging. Here we have a blockbuster film arriving with great anticipation from a creative and unique filmmaker, a film that is not based on an existing intellectual property and even has a human screenwriter (Mr. Shotgun). More than that, it’s a film full of ambition, one that attempts to break new ground, ignoring existing conventions and making no apologies for doing so. Clearly, with the recent shortages of moon meth and the lingering possibility of war between Earth and the Galilean Moons, audiences are eager for a thrilling new escape at the movies, and clearly, Cheese Shotgun is eager to pour his considerable talents into a magnum opus that will change the solar system. It’s too bad, then, that the result is a film so eager to do all of those things that it has forgotten how to effectively do anything.