After confessing what scares him, Stephen Dedalus stops at 'Portrait of a teenage artist' in everything that keeps him on his feet; which are not so much their fears as the most intimate fear of precisely being afraid: "I am not afraid to be alone, nor to abandon what I have to abandon, whatever it may be. I am not afraid of making a mistake, even if it is a mistake of importance, a mistake for life, as long perhaps as eternity itself. " And the statement could well serve as a corollary to frame the proverbial document that director Garret Price signs around the life or, better, within the life of the actor Anton Yelchin (1989-2016).
'With love, Antosha' is the title of the film that opens on Sunday TCM and that more than review the existence of the young actor who died at the age of 27, he reconstructs it with a delicacy and depth that could well pass for the most beautiful and eternal mistake never counted. "I always had the feeling of being inside Anton's head," says the director, not so much out of vanity as because of the mechanics of a film itself that feeds on the enormous production of home videos and self-filming that the protagonist (with the enthusiastic help of his parents) he left behind as a testimony and a mirror.
As the director himself confesses, and in a parallel neither intended nor dreamed of by the novel by James Joyce, this too is the portrait of liberation and, rushing with guilt, the ugly and sad guilt of dying young by an adolescent artist. When Anton Yelchin died in an accident as stupid as all stupid accidents, he quit nearly 70 jobs as, say, professional. These are films, some of them as remarkable and hidden as ' Green room' and ' Como locos' , and others as popular as the new 'Star Trek' saga . But still, his best work was his own life reflected second by second in a newspaper, both written and filmed, eternal. ' With love, Antosha' gathers in a prodigious puzzle every flash of a poisoned biography of a rare creative despair. What is presented on paper as a documentary about the hero fled too soon, is actually a beautiful love letter to love itself. And to the art of interperetation, which is also the art of mirrors. It is not James Dean. It is not Heath Ledger. It is the myth of all of them corrected and even increased.
Price says that a friend of both his parents and himself contacted him to see what he could do with a project between strange and just disproportionate. He, an editor rather than a director, was suddenly surprised by an infinity of videos, notebooks, annotations and photos with Anton as the protagonist and director of himself. "When I started to see the material, I had the feeling of being inside Anton's head. He was a guy who, since he was born, wrote down every wish, kept minutes of every thought and tried to create as if life were his way. It was an artist who in the first second of life knew himself to be an artist, " says Price and, in effect, that is what a film as warm as it is feverish shows; so radically honest that it makes the very concept of modesty blush. Already in one of the first images of an almost baby Anton, he is heard asking his father how to say in English the word that he pronounces in Russian and who is "photographer". It is just a detail.
The film reconstructs the life of a son of ice skaters exiled in the United States. Irina, the mother who stars in the first third of the film, tells the extravagance of a gifted son who, from birth, hid a fatal secret. He was born with the genetic disease called cystic fibrosis that has always hidden everyone. It is a degenerative disease that condemns suffocation without possible cure. From the first moment Anton Yelchin was known in a race against the clock against himself and against his overwhelming desire. And that's where both Price's film and Yelchin's own biography become great.
His first role as a child came for the series ' Emergencies '. In one scene he had to cry and he did so well that his tears seemed like the harbinger of everything to come. "The feeling he conveys is not that of a man obsessed with creating; he is rather a man who created so as not to die," says Price, and he is right. Beyond the viscerality with which he approached each role independently that was for the dubbing of one of the smurfs than for ' Terminator. Salvation ' that for ' The Beaver ' at the hands of Jodie Foster, what committed him to life was the certainty of being at the very limit of death. This is how he tells it and how it shows. Perhaps he was tormented by the mistake of not being able to make the greatest mistake, over and over, forever. Like Dedalus.
The film progresses and by it we know his difficulty in speaking bad Russian, which is what his character Chekov did in 'Star Trek' ; that and his obsession with Travis of 'Taxi driver' ; that and her story of more than just love with a desolate Kristen Stewart on screen at the evidence of her memory (and even with Jennifer Lawrence , just as devastated in front of the camera); that and his fear of losing his hair as he confesses to Willem Defoe ; that and her ability to enthuse each of her colleagues in each of her films; that and her gifts for photography; that and his fondness for the underworlds, nightclubs and bizarre sex (if only as an attentive spectator); that and every corner of the soul of an Anton Yelchin that, suddenly, never ends. How much would she have been capable if death had not loved her so soon? It is the last question that grips the film and leaves Anton pending his first film as a director.
"I don't know," Price replies. And he continues: "What I am convinced of is that Anton would have taken advantage of the quarantine to write 10 scripts in one go." He knew he was haunted by a disease he fought against day by day, robbing him every moment of the darkest night. On June 19, 2016, he embedded the car against the fence of his own house. There he was trapped. Unable to breathe. A mistake. Eternal.
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