Regional filmmaking is supposedly on the rise, but most movies shot outside Hollywood or New York still have a bland feel of setting up cameras in a location and just getting the surface.
Not so the films of New England’s Jay Craven, a writer-director with a short list of credits but a great deal of loyalty to his home turf. With his new film, “Disappearances,” Craven completes a trilogy of Vermont movies based on novels by Howard Frank Mosher. The best-known previous film in the series was “Where the Rivers Run North,” a 1994 picture with Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox.
“Disappearances” is the kind of peculiar movie that could only be made by someone working on a very low budget – which buys creative license. Part period drama and part fantastical folk tale, this movie defies characterization, and sometimes logic. But I enjoyed being around it.
It’s 1932, near the end of Prohibition. Up in north Vermont, an old rapscallion and former bootlegger named Quebec Bill (Kris Kristofferson) plots to make a run across the Canadian border to pick up a load of whiskey and smuggle it back across.
His confederates in this illegal enterprise are a skeptical brother-in-law (Gary Farmer) and a crotchety sidekick (William Sanderson). Most importantly, he also has his teenage son (Charlie McDermott) in tow.
Taking the kid is a highly irresponsible decision, but we get the idea that Quebec Bill isn’t exactly destined for a Norman Rockwell painting. What follows is an adventure, with its share of lethal danger.
Some of this plays out a little like William Faulkner’s “The Reivers,” with a strong sense of a momentous journey being recalled. What’s different about this movie is that it goes from being realistic to mythological, especially when Quebec Bill and the boys steal whiskey from a crazed smuggler.
This is Carcajou, played by Canadian actor Lothaire Bluteau, who seems to be part pirate, part skunk. When he’s traipsing through the forest with his crew, he looks like a “Batman” villain and his henchmen.
We’ve been cued to the mystical possibilities of the story by the presence of Quebec Bill’s sister (Genevieve Bujold, Kristofferson’s co-star from “Trouble in Mind”), who delivers mysterious one-liners and then vanishes.
The film has flavorful dialogue, great locations and an iconic performance by Kristofferson. Even when it doesn’t quite hold together, there’s something about it that feels original.
Kris Kristofferson stars in “Disappearances.”
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