Septien

Emerging Visions
D: Michael Tully, with Robert Longstreet, Onur Tukel, Michael Tully

Take The Royal Tenenbaums. Steal their money, education, and clean clothes, and then dump them in rural Tennessee. Meet the Rawlings Brothers. Septien begins when long-lost brother Cornelius (played by director Tully) shambles home after 18 years. After that entrance, Tully has no interest in assembling a clear narrative. Instead he drops stones into the Rawlings� dysfunctional family mill pond and stares at the ripples. By turns charmingly frustrating and annoyingly fascinating, their tale is more enigma than story. Where has ex-high school jock Cornelius been? What is brother Amos (Turkel) drawing in the barn? Why does self-declared matriarch Ezra (Longstreet) scrub everything in the ramshackle house? The common answer is a shared history, buried like the old camcorder in a sack in the yard, and a mystery, like Ezra�s perpetually and metaphorically incomplete jigsaw.

This article appears in March 18 • 2011.

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The Chronicle's first Culture Desk editor, Richard has reported on Austin's growing film production and appreciation scene for over a decade. A graduate of the universities of York, Stirling, and UT-Austin, a Rotten Tomatoes certified critic, and eight-time Best of Austin winner, he's currently at work on two books and a play.