From Cannes: "The Other Side" a Unique Look at Marginalization

One of the more explicit films at the Cannes Film Festival this year outside of Gaspar Noé’s “Love,” “The Other Side” opens with a full-frontal shot of a naked man, passed out on the side of the road. It is a relatively normal scene for the documentary, which focuses on the citizens of a rural Louisiana town and features rampant nudity, sex, and drug use.Italian-born director and co-writer Roberto Minervini—who recently completed a trilogy of films about the state of Texas—zeroes in on a marginalized community to present an unadulterated and poetically tragic portrait of small-town America.

It’s a community filled with people like Mark (Mark Kelley) and Lisa (Lisa Allen), who spend much of their time drinking, smoking weed, or using methamphetamine. When Mark is not doing meth, he is cooking small amounts of it in a dark, cramped trailer—a more depressingly realistic portrayal compared to “Breaking Bad”—and dealing it to everyone from his sister to a pregnant woman. Along these lines, the film has a lot of potential walk-out triggering moments: Mark helping Lisa shoot up using veins on her breasts, Christmas dinners dominated by criticism of President Obama and liberal use of the N-word, and even the aforementioned pregnant woman doing meth before doing her shift at a strip club.

Minervini portrays this squalor from a cool, detached perspective—even when Mark criticizes Obama’s economic policies or a toothless veteran rambles on about Hillary Clinton, Minervini seems to refrain from passing judgment. If anything, he aims to highlight the unseen tragedy behind the town’s unabashed hedonism, in moments such as one when Mark and Lisa contemplate voluntarily going to jail for three months to kick their drug dependency. Although their characters are distinctly unlikeable, their raw and convincing vulnerability evokes empathy. Between the film’s quintessentially American wet T-shirt contests or discussions of Second Amendment rights, there exists a desolate group of people with no real place in society. Even when the film focuses on a tight-knit militaristic group of Libertarians, Minervini shows the bitter irony of their existence—until the collapse of society into total anarchy, they will be forever irrelevant and relegated to the fringe. Yet once one moves past the shock value of the film’s brutally honest portrayals of debauchery, it is still a rare glimpse at a part of society most will never see.