Waiting for Glover: An Approximation of their Barbarous Manners (2021)
In An Approximation of their Barbarous Manners, Christian Serritiello’s witty, whirlwind send-up of actors and their egos, an indie film crew and cast await Bruce Glover, who is signed on to be the headline-grabbing star of the film, and has gone AWOL. Like actors everywhere, these thespians are an unruly mixture of fantastic self-regard, equally fantastic generosity, meticulous dedication to craft, laziness, poetic dreaminess, cutthroat competitiveness, and petulance. They are moored together on location, a comfortable but small house in Tangier, which barely has room enough to contain them. As aspiring film actors, they are all intoxicated by the glamour of being in a film with a “real Hollywood legend,” and so Glover becomes the film’s Godot, the savior who never arrives.
While waiting, they gossip, space out, play odd games with one another, and occasionally run lines from the script and work on their characters. The screenplay, or the fragments we hear of it, naturally seems to be of a film-about-actors-making-a-film, and so the cleverly written dialog emphasizes the competitive, resentful side of actors. (“He’s a thief who steals attention away from my anecdotal crescendos!”) We are watching a film about actors making a film about actors making a film, and the levels of recursion can seem dizzying, at times, as if we’re in a funhouse Hall of Mirrors.
Glover, seen by himself at the film’s beginning and end, is utterly charming, an elderly man, still in love with his power as an actor to make words on a page come alive, and churning out well-worn gems from his glory days in Hollywood.
The performance style in the film veers from somewhat natural to highly stylized, exaggerated farce, but these shifts in tone feel seamless, since we are watching people who are skilled at continual self-dramatization. A couple dances amorously, seemingly performing more for the camera than for one another. A roomful of people are seated behind them, but they’re all watching the door, rather than the dancers. (Presumably, they expect Glover to walk in at any moment.) As they get increasingly desperate, waiting for the no-show movie star, they indeed begin to act increasingly barbarously, at one point knocking over a disabled crew member. We never learn enough about the script they’re shooting to know why they’re in Morocco, but this ragtag assortment of Europeans brings to mind the generations of bohemian Westerners who have come to Tangier, seeking permission to abandon the decorum of polite society and let themselves go, in a whirlwind of drugs and sex, preferably while scratching out a few poems on the side. Who are the barbarians, and who are the artists? It’s anyone’s guess. Serritiello’s film provides a great deal of fun, lovingly teasing them for their tamely wild behavior.
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