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Running Stumbled

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by Claire Fowler
Twenty-nine years after filmmaker John Maringouin was whisked away from the father who apparently tried to kill him in utero, the son returns to New Orleans for a family reunion of the most dysfunctional kind.

Arriving in the midst of domestic and narrative chaos, the journey towards the delicate untangling of characters and relationships begins. Maringouin’s father is Johnny Roe; a drug addicted failed Dadaist painter who resides in squalor with his combatant and common-law wife Marie; a faded addict whose preoccupations exclude all besides drugs and her own ever-imminent death. We only briefly glimpse the filmmaker as he first acquaints himself with his estranged father and the woman he has lived with for nine years, the frame thereafter being dominated by the drama that plays itself out in the increasingly revealing yet destructive interactions between Jonny Roe and Marie. Their rotting and filthy house plays host to the drama of a relationship that has been poisoned by addiction and its resulting self-obsession.

Rather than offering a journey of father-son reconciliation, Running Stumbled takes the viewer on a claustrophobic, hallucinatory, domestic trip. Seemingly oblivious to the thorough resentment her critical and rambling diatribes attract from her partner, Marie, aided by prescription drugs, still fantasises about their great love. Jonny on the other hand, cannot wait for his tiresome and foulmouthed ex-muse to die, as she continually promises to do – even going so far as to estimate the month (September). A third character, the scatological neighbour Stanley Laviolette, who is ‘caring’ for his dying mother, provides an additional element of obsessive and unsavoury preoccupation. Their rambling, drug-fuelled conflicts take us on a repetitive cycle of sniping, disgust, jealousy, greed, hopeless faith and nostalgia. Revelations about the past provide precious glimpses into a life past, one beyond the need for a constant high.
Maringouin manipulates this bitter reality by framing his documentary with scripted scenes that offer a considered yet abstracted interpretation of what his role as son/filmmaker is. His collusion with the twisted scenes that take place before him forces him and the viewer to question both roles, and to confront, and ultimately accept, his own deranged legacy. Constructed in titled chapters, Maringouin’s editing is superb, flicking from the suffocating, highly-pixellated, tinted slo-mo sequences, to searching, hand-held observations of drug-induced fadeouts. Finally, as the poisoned relationship between Jonny Roe and Marie becomes impossible to observe, Maringouin documents a release. To what extent this is scripted is unclear, and at this point almost irrelevant. The filmmaker, whom we had almost forgotten about, is briefly brought back into the picture, and the viewer can only feel utter compassion for his ordeal…
Dir. John Maringouin, USA 2006, 85 mins

Running Stumbled is released on 27th July 2007 at the ICA.
Watch the trailer online.

Related Pages

Read our interview with director John Maringouin on DFGdocs/Resources.

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