***/****
starring Leslie Silva, Jason Olive, Tom Maden, Jennifer Jalene
written and directed by Mia Trachinger
by Alex Jackson The key image of Mia Trachinger’s Reversion, her follow-up to the eight-year-old, still-undistributed Bunny, is star Leslie Silva’s outrageously unkempt Afro and supermodel physique. Trachinger betrays nostalgia for the early-’90s nostalgia for the 1970s. Her cool is a grungy slacker cool, all heroin-chic and deadpan nihilism. She’s delightfully fifteen years behind the loop, making a hipster film for an audience that no longer exists. Almost everybody in Reversion looks and acts fashionably homeless. In an early scene, Silva’s character Eva even goes into a supermarket with her peers and eats the food right off the shelves! It turns out these people are mutants born without the “time gene.” The past, present, and future all co-exist for them in a non-linear fashion. So you would think them philosophically deterministic like the space aliens in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, right? Well, sort of, but not quite. Trachinger focuses instead on their amorality. Having never learned to associate a cause with its resulting effect, they steal cars at gunpoint and of course eat out of grocery stores without paying. One of the ideas floating around in the film is that this genetic defect might actually make them more “human” than most humans in that they are freed of the mechanizing effect of Skinner behavioralism. This notion has a kind of adolescent romance to it: they’re simultaneously more damaged and more evolved than the rest of us. Nevertheless, Eva hates being a mutant, particularly since she knows that she will somehow shoot and kill her lover Marcus (Jason Olive). The brunt of the plot is focused on their attempts to avoid this inevitable conclusion. So, has the gene hopelessly rendered them free agents or are they cogs of fate? Somehow, Trachinger has convinced me that it’s both, and she has the proof if I ever want to study it. The film ends on a softly ambiguous note, and this ambiguity seems to be the mutant version of a triumphant ending. Reversion is too pretentious and dense to be truly elating and, to be perfectly honest, the philosophy appears to be a function of cool rather than the other way around. Yet I can’t help but appreciate it on those terms, too. If it’s fashionably nihilistic, it’s at least earnest and a little romantic about it as opposed to protectively sarcastic. As far as pseudo-science-fiction goes, that makes Reversion worth ten Gregg Arakis.
