***/****
directed by Ken August Meyer
Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 27-May 7, 2023. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.
By Angelo Muredda Swiss-German surrealist Paul Klee becomes a guardian angel for a chronically ill artist in search of a disabled ancestor in Ken August Meyer’s documentary Angel Applicant, a playful and affecting memoir of the filmmaker’s progress with systemic scleroderma–the same rare autoimmune disease with which Klee was posthumously diagnosed. Self-deprecating and puckish, Meyer walks us through the indignities and aesthetic possibilities of his bodily transformation with a mix of observational footage of himself in and out of hospitals and clinics and magical-realist dramatizations that see him replaced with a lifelike doll whose rigid body stands in for his stiffening skin and joints. He weaves an examination of Klee’s late style into these diaristic musings on illness, pain, and creation in spite of both, drawing inspiration from the artist’s prolific output in his final years living with scleroderma. In the process, Meyer openly wonders if Klee’s turn from intricate to bold lines and surrealist images of disjointed bodies in pain–modernist pieces deemed “degenerate art” by Hitler–might serve as a model for his own uncertain path forward.
Meyer’s background as a former art director for the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy comes through in the film’s more fanciful interludes, which have the wry aesthetic language and glib humour of something like the Robaxacet campaign where a marionette is stuffed full of pins to signify debilitating back pain. These include an arresting set-piece where he visualizes a memory of two women at a grocery store mistaking him for a mannequin and a montage that illustrates the unsettling sensory journey of his changing hands by substituting his fingers with a procession of popsicles, hot dogs, and claws. Sometimes, that advertiser’s sensibility manifests in cloying ways, as when he muses–a bit patly–of Klee’s opaque series of angel paintings, “Perhaps we need some uncertainty, just as nature depends on decay for growth.” Otherwise, Meyer’s blend of disability memoir and amateur art history is poignant stuff, a melancholy effort to forge a kinship bond with an irretrievably lost artist who can communicate with him at a distance through the abstractions of his art.
