How weird and riveting and creepily fantastic a new documentary about an eccentric and lavishly haired family living in New York is. The Wolfpack follows the Angulos, a group of Hare Krishna types who spend all their time locked up in a four-bedroom apartment. I say “follows”, but really I mean “tracks the same 20ft of carpet”. Their father, a strange Peruvian immigrant called Oscar, keeps the single front-door key and forbids them to go outside.
“Sometimes we’d go out nine times a year,” says one of his six sons, staring out at the Lower East Side, “and sometimes once. And one particular year, we never got out at all.”
Probably the most obvious comparison, in terms of tone and subject matter, is Grey Gardens, the 1975 film that followed two of Jackie Kennedy’s bonkers cousins in East Hampton. Edie and Edith Bouvier were once society beauties, but by the time a film crew arrived, they were dirty, cloistered hermits, feeding wild raccoons and watching cats defecate behind paintings in the halls of their decaying mansion.
The Angulos could not be further down the social scale, living on money paid by the state to their mother, who home-schools them. But the family is similarly unclean and eccentric, obsessed with songs and showbiz, dancers, singers, performers and weirdos. One of their favourite pastimes is acting out great chunks of well-known films (mostly Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan). “If I didn’t have movies... there wouldn’t be any point to go on,” says one of them.
Like Grey Gardens, the film shows a family that is essentially a “closed system”, a homogenous unit that acts as one according to a set of unspoken rules — in the case of the Angulos, now in their late teens and early twenties, growing their hair long, wearing the same clothes, only eating lasagne, endlessly making costumes. (One Batman outfit, for a re-enactment of The Dark Knight Rises, is made out of yoga mats and cereal boxes.)
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Perhaps the most interesting character is the tyrannical Oscar, a mysterious telly addict and obvious drunk who lurks in one room in his underpants. Inspired by a Hindu god, he wanted to have 10 children with their mother, Susanne, a hippie from the Midwest who met him giving tours to white tourists on the Inca Trail. But she eventually stopped being able to have them, so there are only seven, with Sanskrit names such as Krsna and Visnu.
Oscar is treated intelligently, though, seeming less a monstrous Fritzl who has shut his kids up in a “prison”, more a confused narcissist who bosses his children in a twittish pointed beanie. “My power is influencing everybody,” he claims.
The director, Crystal Moselle, does not interview him until 50 minutes into the film, leaving the viewer desperate to know how he managed to get this bad. The answers slowly emerge: boozing, paranoia and disappointment. The original plan was to go to Scandinavia, but the family only got as far as the Lower East Side. Oscar was (quite rightly) horrified by the dirt and the local drug-dealing, so he decided (quite wrongly) to prevent his family from going out and becoming “contaminated”.
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Inside the flat, there is, oddly, a kind of anarchy. The children get to watch whatever they like, scream, drink alcohol, run around playing with toy weapons. Any religious devotion is apparently limited to their names, their hair and the slightly off-putting practice of kissing each other on the lips. If anything, the family worships the television; cooped up, it is their only entertainment. I began to wonder how much they had actually learnt from the TV. Is it why their voices seem slightly unreal, so weird and singsong?
Moselle spent five years making this film; she ran into the brothers on one of their rare trips outside, and eventually persuaded them to let her into their home. She had access to the entire family, as well as hours of grainy home video. It is obvious quite a lot of it is staged, or at least heavily massaged; a group trip to Coney Island contains as many clichés as a music video. And would they really have dressed up like the characters in Reservoir Dogs just to go to the cinema? Did they really go out as little as the documentary claims? (There is old footage of them happily outside on trips.) Apart from that, it’s fascinating and well made.
Cut, as ever, to Georgia. The President is a slightly bizarre film about a fallen dictator whose power is ripped from his grasp. He finds himself on the run in the countryside, chased by rebels, with only his six-year-old grandson as a companion. According to its Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the story is inspired by both the Arab Spring and “the rubble of the destroyed Darul Aman Palace”, in Kabul. It is fantasy, allegory, dream sequence and horror show.
And, you know, it’s all right. I say this with several caveats: it’s in Georgian; it’s slightly unplaceable; it’s funny and then it’s not funny; and there are some incredibly foreign moments — nylon costumes, classical music with a slight electronic backbeat, riot scenes that look like a “themed” Eurovision song, dance instructors with scarves and child actors who look secretly thrilled, as if they have won the part on a provincial gameshow. But there are also some brilliant moments, including a presidential limo trying to make its way through a herd of sheep; a child wading through tall grass; a rebel army stomping across a bridge. And if you ever wondered what rural Georgia really looks like, then this is definitely your film.
As for the message, well, what? Dictators are bad? I can’t even work out whether the president, played by Mikheil Gomiashvili, is meant to be good or evil. But if you want to know how Saddam Hussein went from a golden palace to a dirty hole, how Colonel Gaddafi might have looked at his death, give it a go.
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The Wolfpack
15, 90 mins
The President
15, 119 mins
