“I’m in a business I don’t love,” says Kirt Gunn, the Lovely By
Surprise writer/director candidly explaining how his film began
online as part of an unusual branding campaign for Lincoln-Mercury but
evolved into a beautiful, strange, and bittersweet film about love,
loss, and temporal distortion.
The business Gunn doesn’t love is advertising, and he doesn’t think
most people like the kinds of marketing materials they’re subjected to
either. “People have respect for communications that are truthful,” he
says, allowing that the original online version of his Lovely By
Surprise was created in the spirit of reciprocity that existed in
the golden age of TV and radio, when brands were admired because of the
shows they sponsored. When Lincoln-Mercury decided to discontinue the
campaign, Gunn, a Memphian now living in Virginia, was then free to
take the web footage and cut it into the film he’d always wanted to
make.
Lovely By Surprise, which was shot in Memphis and which won a
Special Jury Prize at the Seattle Film Festival, weaves together the
stories of Marian (Carrie Preston), a blocked writer struggling with
some difficult advice, and Bob (Reg Rogers), a profoundly sad and
ineffectual car salesman whose daughter lost the ability to speak when
her mother died. It also tells the story of Marian’s fictional
characters. Incomplete by design, they are represented by a pair of
infantile adults who wear nothing but brightly colored underwear and
live on a landlocked houseboat in the middle of a field.
“A lot of people have asked why I didn’t make a more accessible
first film,” Gunn says. “The thing is, I don’t know if I’d be
interested in making another kind of film. Or that I even could. And I
didn’t know if I’d ever get a chance to make another film, so I had to
make the kind of film I always wanted to make.”
It’s no accident that Gunn has written Bob as a salesman who keeps
talking potential customers out of buying a car. Bob —
beautifully acted by Rogers — shows his clients how the purchase
is just a stand-in for something more meaningful that’s missing in
their life.
“That’s about me,” he says. Gunn, who majored in theater at
U.T.-Knoxville and once ran the River City Shakespeare Festival out of
Memphis’ dilapidated Tennessee Brewery, describes Bob’s compulsion to
talk people out of buying as an “antithesis to Glengarry Glen
Ross,” David Mamet’s brutal satire about real-estate salesmen in
Chicago. Although it is usually compared to Charlie Kaufman’s
Adaptation, Lovely By Surprise — an unusually
talky film — is much more of a theatrical endeavor. In its
structure and its use of language, it owes a greater debt to
playwrights like Mamet and Sam Shepard than it does to the work of any
filmmaker, except perhaps David Lynch.
Lovely By Surprise — the closing-night feature at
the Indie Memphis Film Festival — was also inspired by the gently
off-kilter and often childlike music of Memphis keyboardist Shelby
Bryant, whose songs appear throughout the film.