Me and My Victim is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.
Me and My Victim begins with co-director Maurane reciting a poem at a party. The poem is about the disparity between pornographic depictions of yoga and massaging and their real-life counterparts. There is a tension felt in the voice of the poem’s speaker, in that she both desires the perversity of the pornographic contexts and is violently averse to the notion of being touched by the men giving the massage and running the yoga class. Within the context of the poem, it is an intriguing tension, and this dichotomy between attraction and disgust (kind of, sort of) defines the narrative of the film.
The bulk of the documentary is a series of recreations of Maurane’s early dates with a romantic partner (the other co-director, Billy Pedlow), dates which are inflected with strange sexual tension. The intent is to expose a certain impersonality and vulnerability (and desperation, perhaps) that goes into modern dating, of dating in the “digital era.”
Perhaps, then, this film’s first few recreations resonate with folks who have been through the trials and tribulations of Tinder match-making. From outside this lens, however, it cannot help but feel like a self-absorbed exercise in diaristic filmmaking. The pair provide the voiceover narration of this story in a podcast-esque series of audio recordings, and it comes off as a rambling exercise that maybe even the friends of these two would not be particularly interested in hearing in full, at least not all at once.
At one point, Billy proclaims that one major impetus for making this film is so that he can “teach men how to be romantic again.” But the story being told doesn’t exude romance so much as it trucks in horniness and vapid poetry. Not to discredit the cinematic potential of hookup culture, but Me and My Victim does not establish a gold standard.
The film hinges, ultimately, on a non-consensual sexual advance from Billy and how it impacts their relationship. The conversation revolving around their differing conceptions of what constitutes consent is the closest the film gets to approaching meaningful subject matter. Quickly, though, the film recenters on its monotonous tale of alcohol-fueled, awkward dates. Maurane appears strongly affected by the encounter, but Billy continuously talks over her in an attempt to justify himself.
Given they are the makers of the film – that they are the only authorial voices here, voices which are, at least in this portion of the film, at odds with each other – the assault is presented with a lack of clarity and (from one authorial party) a disconcerting lack of seriousness. The encounter is to what the title of the film alludes, and in that title Maurane is the object of the action. Fittingly (and unfortunately), Billy, the subject “Me,” dominates the conversation and shuts down Maurane’s objections to what happened that night and Billy’s interpretation of it. Perhaps this reveals something important about consent, but it’s ultimately hard to say when the conversation is so centered on Billy performing damage control over his image in real time.
Visually, the film occasionally pops with inventive uses of a minimal budget. The DIY aesthetic makes good use of erratic lo-fi images and the occasional stock footage. Other times, when the film runs out of visual juice, it resorts to writing the text of the voiceover on the screen in Microsoft Paint-style red lettering which comes off like a gimmick to make the film feel like trashy Internet art.
Frankly, the low budget ethos does not make up for the meandering narration about a relationship that the filmmakers never convincingly argue is interesting to anyone but themselves. In certain moments, it is unclear how much they themselves are interested in the story. Into the second hour (which is at least their third recording session), they allow themselves tangents that include poking fun at an art critic’s mint green polo shirt, how much they love the punk mentality, the packaging of Bud Light cans, and so on. Not to mention the sequences at one of Billy’s poetry readings, which, to put it politely, do not cast him in as great of a light as he likely thinks that they do.
Me and My Victim wants to be about the messiness of modern relationships. Instead, it is a messy film, where the potentially potent questions are actively suppressed by the filmmaker. Who knows — maybe this is the point. Maybe the film is about how the important parts of the conversation are perpetually silenced and that silence is normalized. In which case, the film is poor and misguided for a different reason.
Me and My Victim: D
As always, thanks for reading!
—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)
CineFiles Movie Reviews 