THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
It was in 2018 that we got wind of Jim Cummings – born in 1986, in New Orleans (Louisiana) – when his first feature film, Thunder road, produced, produced, edited and performed by himself, was released in France. Shot for a fistful of dollars in Austin with a few friends, it’s the story of a police officer who crumbles on all fronts (his mother dies, his wife continues to hate him after leaving him , his daughter and his colleagues consider him with a very suspicious eye, his superior fires him…). We were immediately stunned by his character, a mixture of infantile disarray and acute psychopathy, passing without transition from laughter to tears, from kindness to violence, like a dismantled puppet.
Still, something strong was taking place, delivered by this strange, implosive, ferociously ambivalent body. Something that had not been seen since the appearance of the phenomenal Jim Carrey, a comical, brutal, anarchic revelation, like America excels, even against itself, at producing. After a werewolf comedy that has not been exported, we find him today with his third feature film, co-signed and performed with his friend PJ McCabe, The Beta Test. More than ever at the center of fictional operations, Cummings this time plays a character named Jordan, a Hollywood agent with a stratospheric ego, but stressed and ulcerated, long past on the other side of reality.
All-round predation
The film opens in gore. A young blonde woman, visibly terrified, makes a call in the half-light of an apartment overlooking the city to report a scene of domestic violence to the police. Failing to see it, we quickly understand that it is in reality to come. Joining her companion at the table, a blond with paroxysmal virility, she announces to him, in Swedish, that she is leaving him, after having lived a dream night with an admirer in a hotel room. The other caresses her cheek, then thrusts his knife into her carotid artery, before hitting her on the ground with several blows, then, for good measure, to defenestate her.
The important element of this horrible scene, as it announces the real subject of the film, is nonetheless the sound information broadcast by a television during the butchery, according to which “Zac Efron is no longer on the market”. It is indeed this sentence which tells most closely the tenor of a film which suggests the terminal level of Hollywood decadence, which indexes the value of human life on the market of success and recognition. Either a universe where all-out predation, moral, professional, sexual, is the minimum condition for survival.
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