I think The Guatemalan Handshake might be my favourite movie so far this year, and yet I’m kind of at a loss to explain why I liked it so much.But maybe I can start by saying that The Guatemalan Handshake is a celebration of genuine American eccentricity. Writer/director Todd Rohal seems to know that true eccentricity doesn’t just consist of a couple of cartoonish quirks; it’s organic, inexplicable... and odd more often than it is funny. True American eccentrics are people like Mr. Turnupseed, a stern old guy who keeps a stash of fireworks secretly stored in his backyard shed, the combination to the lock hidden in the sunshade of his vintage electric car, and a photo of himself, Willie Mays, and the world’s largest piece of bubblegum mounted on a piece of wood and hung on the wall of the TV room. It’s people like Stool, a social misfit who takes his shirt off whenever he gets excited and blithely keeps on drinking milkshakes even though he’s lactose intolerant. And it’s people like Turkeylegs, a 10-year-old part-time mechanic who conducts her own investigation when her 40-year-old best friend vanishes and no one else bothers to go looking for him.
Those character descriptions may sound silly and mannered, but if The Guatemalan Handshake resembles, say, Napoleon Dynamite, it’s Napoleon Dynamite after it’s filtered through the sensibility of George Washington and All the Real Girls, with maybe a pinch of Gummo. (And indeed, David Gordon Green is thanked in the credits and wrote an enthusiastic essay about the film for the DVD booklet.) Shot for only $70,000, the film is one of the most gorgeous-looking comedies I’ve ever seen, full of impeccable widescreen compositions and a palette of warm oranges, browns, and greens that Terrence Malick would flip over. (He’d also probably be flattered by the voiceover narration by top-billed little Katy Harwood as Turkeylegs, which recalls Linda Manz’ narration from Days of Heaven.)
The action unfolds in a small town in Pennsylvania that’s like a Brigadoon of ’70s detritus: the cordless phone doesn’t seem to have penetrated here yet; wood paneling has not yet gone out of style; men wear sideburns, large-collared dress shirts, and polyester shorts without irony; and everyone’s idea of a good time is going to the fair and taking in a demolition derby. But the ’70s fashions aren’t punchlines, the way they are in Will Ferrell comedies; rather, they’re used nostalgically, even poignantly, to evoke an age when wood was more common than chrome, when people were more comfortable with their own homegrown tackiness, when kids could spend the night chasing fireflies through a wheatfield without anybody worrying. It’s a place where phone booths still exist, where old (current?) issues of Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction sit on people’s coffee tables, and where the best possible fairground prize is a giant fake mustache.
In one scene, elderly Ethel Firecracker reads her own obituary in the town newspaper, and shuffles off, bewildered but resigned, to attend her own memorial service. In another scene, Turkeylegs prepares herself a meal by standing a hollow chocolate Easter bunny in a bowl of half-melted ice cream, breaking it in half, filling it with chocolate milk, and methodically topping it all off with whipped cream and chocolate syrup. In another, a pair of Boy Scouts drive down the highway, uncaringly tossing dollar bills, one by one, out the window behind them. Hey, it’s one way to pass the time.
Movies like The Guatemalan Handshake seem like small miracles, made with whatever materials and locations happened to be at hand, starring people on the street and in the schools, with no marketing plan, no interest in attracting Hollywood distribution, no goal of becoming “this year’s Juno”—a real-life version of the “neighbourhood filmmaking” celebrated within Be Kind Rewind, but made with a genuine artist’s eye and not a couple of amateurs with an old camcorder.
That’s the second time I’ve used “genuine” to describe this movie, but I can’t think of a better word to replace it. It’s genuinely funny, genuinely touching, genuinely original, and at more than a few times, genuinely perplexing. And I’m genuinely grateful to the people at Benten Films for making this gem available on DVD.
* * * * *
I hesitated about linking to this music video, even though it was directed by Rohal and features Guatemalan Handshake cast member Ivan Dimitrov and composer David Wingo—it doesn’t reflect the look or the tone of the film at all, and will probably scare off plenty of people from the movie just after I spent 700 words convincing them to give it a shot. But this video is just too damned bizarre for me not to show it to you. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ola Podrida’s “Lost and Found”...
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