down and out with the dolls

Film, 2001, 3.5 stars

Written and Directed: Kurt Voss

It is precisely when you have low expectations that you become open for something to really surprise you. That was the feeling I had as the credits rolled on this film. On paper it doesn't seem that promising, and indeed for the first ten minutes or so you'll be asking yourself what the hell you've gotten yourself into. In the end though, it delivers in ways you won't expect and has "cult classic" written all over it.

Down and Out with the Dolls traces the very brief rise and fall of all-girl rock band The Paper Dolls. Reggie, Kali and Lavender are friends with a three-piece chick band who are going exactly nowhere. Fauna breaks up with her loser, Eurotrash boyfriend and finds herself ejected from her goth band. In desperation, she decides to be their lead singer, and The Paper Dolls are born.

To save money to make a record and go on tour, the girls decide to live together in a huge house with a basement they can use as a rehearsal space. Pretty soon personal habits and creative egos start clashing, which ironically makes the band sound even better, even as the four girls are falling apart personally.

Kali has her heart set on the gorgeous Levi, lead singer of The Suicide Bombers, who looks at her as a little sister. She writes earnest, heartwrenching songs that are all feeling and not commercial. She gets depressed as Fauna takes her melodies, changes the lyrics and turns the Dolls into radio punk-pop. Sure, it'll sell, but is it still art?

All Fauna sees is that the Dolls could be her last crack at the big time and she gives it all she's got, bonking any guy that moves who can help the band with their careers, including Levi.

Meanwhile, Reggie the band's drummer (played by Canadian indie artist Kinnie Starr) experiences a sexual awakening. Bored with the guy she's seeing, she's hit on one day at the skate park by a girl and sees a whole new world opening up. Reggie, finally wanting sex now she's discovered women, proceeds to sleep with half the girls in Portland, which gets the goat of both her boyfriend and Heather, the girl who first picked her up. The two jilted lovers plan a revenge on Reggie that backfires dramatically.

Valentine works in her boyfriend's second hand record shop. They're a happy couple. He asks her to move in with him, plans that are derailed by the Dolls' plan of living together. Eventually his jealousy of her burgeoning career almost causes them to break up. Val, the only cool head of the bunch, acts as a kind of narrator for the film, charting their successes and failures with a sly, droll humour.

Each frame of this rocking, irreverent indie pops out at you like a frame from a comic book. The characters are broadly drawn, hitting but not overabusing familiar caricatures. Reggie is a promiscuous lesbian cliché, but this is mercifully balanced out by Fauna playing the heterosexual equivalent. Somehow amongst Fauna's fucking around she manages to make Reggie's philandering seem innocent, like a kid playing with new toys.

My favourite character has to be Kali. Besides being cute, it was hard not to empathise with her fierce unrequited love and her save-the-world songwriting. She's honest by nature, and it gets her into all kinds of emotional trouble.

Eventually the Dolls land a record deal, make a record and are on the verge of breaking through. They decide to hold a huge house party. The next morning all we're left with is broken friendships, violence, hangovers, and a dead body in the basement.

Down and Out with the Dolls understands the basics of indie filmmaking. Give us decent acting, characters with depth and a story we can get into and stuff like shaky cameras and bad lighting stops mattering. It's not poetry, and the music isn't great (not like Prey for Rock and Roll for example), but it's a film that will have you shaking your head afterwards and saying "you know, I expected awful, but that really didn't suck." It's a backhanded compliment, I know.