What starts as a goofy mockumentary quickly turns into a surprisingly heartfelt look at creative obsession and the oddballs who chase their visions.
by Nav Qateel
Mockumentary Remi Milligan: Lost Director is a film that surprised me after opening with cheesy, low budget shots of Remi (Yoshi Barrigas) hamming it up in one of his short movies, only to follow with an engrossing tale of Milligan’s creative and personal struggle. The documentary is put together after Remi mysteriously vanishes, never to be seen or heard of again.
With a mix of interviews from family and co-workers, along with clips from Remi’s five short films, we learn how no matter how crazy his ideas were, he would go all out to get them made, often using interesting techniques. Having very little money to produce his films, Remi relied quite heavily on his parents, both of whom feature substantially in the documentary.
When it came to Remi himself, he had all the confidence in the world, but the type of confidence that Michael Scott from The Office had, where his jokes left people feeling awkward rather than amused. This appears to be a side of him that his co-workers saw but not his tiny but passionate audience. Remi is the type of character who actually felt like a real life person and not just someone from the imagination of writer and director Samuel Lodato.
What really drew me in after the initial introductory scenes was when we got to see the creative process for Remi’s films, using a mixture of hand drawings, stop-motion, and VHS wizardry, all of which I found fascinating and entertaining. Lodato demonstrated wonderful creative skill by incorporating all these filming techniques and blending them with convincing, heartfelt interviews. Even the tongue-in-cheek parts of the interviews had an honesty to them that felt endearing.
With titles like horror film Killer Pencil and musical Dance at Guantanamo Bay, you can get an idea of what to expect from the mind of Remi Mulligan (via Samuel Lodato), and after watching how the fake films were made, I think I’d actually like to see Lodato make them for real, as I for one would watch. Perhaps the filmmaker could have something similar to Robert Rodriguez’s Machete on his hands, a film that started out as a fake trailer.
I had a great time with Lodato’s effort and feel we will be seeing more from the writer and director. A highly entertaining film that should please anyone with an interest in movies.
Nav’s Score: 9/10
