American Interior ***
Dir: Dylan Goch.
With: Gruff Rhys. 91 mins. Cert: 12A
Super Furry Animals
frontman Gruff Rhys has already gone West once on film, with 2010’s Separado!, his characteristically
idiosyncratic history of the Welsh adventure in Patagonia. Now he offers this
record of a tour that wasn’t quite a tour: a retracing of John Evans’ 1792
quest to find Welsh-speaking Native Americans that has yielded a Dave
Gorman-like PowerPoint presentation and an album bearing a distinctly American
chug and twang. Clearly, Rhys was creating as he went along, which accounts for
the film’s spontaneity, but also its restless contradictions. Silvery
photography stifles some of its larkiness; vox pops drown out the quieter
numbers. Only the title track’s gorgeous anomie lingers, but this tentative
survey, full of beans and half-baked ideas alike, still generates broad grins:
having a Muppet represent Evans is an approach a Schama might consider
non-canonical, yet it’s more evidence of Rhys’s status as among the daftest,
most engaging performers out there.
American Interior opens in selected cinemas from today.
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