The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow, 2019)

In different circumstances -- referring to highly abstract works of the avant-garde -- I have argued that the biggest risk that a work of art can take is being willing to be mistaken for nothing. In its own subtle way, The Plagiarists, directed by Peter Parlow and co-written by Robin Schavoir and filmmaker James N. Kientiz Wilkins, is just such an artwork, a film that is so negligible on its face that it is possible to miss its much broader implications. Shot on Beta SP, the film looks like a grotty artifact from another time, a fact that becomes one of the themes of the film itself. That time, based on the technology, would be the 1980s, when Baudrillard and Lyotard were in the air and the art world joined hands with philosophy to ask, are we living in an endless simulation of a prior but inaccessible reality?

The start of The Plagiarists is almost eyerollingly familiar. A young couple's car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and a kindly stranger offers to help. They go back to his home and try to figure out whether he poses a threat. But the stakes are slightly higher. Tyler (Eamon Monaghan) is a wannabe filmmaker who is currently working as a D.P. on commercial shoots. Anna (Lucy Kaminsky) is a writer working on a novel. Clip (Michael "Clip" Payne), the helpful stranger, is an older black man, and the young white couple are concerned about his intentions, but even more concerned about being racist, so they go along with him.

As liquor flows and people get to know each other better, Clip shows Anna an unexpectedly poetic side of himself. Once the couple leave, Anna encounters Clip's words again, in a most unexpected place. This creates a crisis for Anna. Why would Clip pretend to be someone he is not? But Tyler counters with a Baudrillardian possibility. Maybe all people wax poetic in pretty much the same way. 

This problem, we're to understand, is to be read back into the film itself, as a means of problematizing the aesthetic goalposts that Tyler and Anna take for granted: "novel," "memoir," "day job," "passion project," etc. The Plagiarists posits a crisis of authenticity simply by allowing for one small rift in the fabric of its own enclosed reality. This is the thread that you pull, the one that unravels the entire weave. But I remain uncertain about the full implcations of The Plagiarists. Is it a diagnosis of the plight of millennials, who have inherited too much history? Is it an analysis of a particular encounter between blinkered white people and a black man, and a misattribution of "authenticity"? Or is it just summing up the plight of the human race?