Caesar’s Park
D: Sarah Price. (16mm, 65 min.)Sarah Price wanted to know her new neighbors, residents of east side Milwaukee’s “Caesar’s Park,” so she picked up a camera and a microphone. The results are radically uneven: Price captures many of the idiosyncrasies and quirks of her over-the-fence characters, but we’re left, like the local walkabout, looking in vain for real “friends.” The transitional music swells in search of significance, but if it all amounts to more than an ambitious home movie, the beer and brats are on me.
The opening night audience applauded the film’s romantic populism, and Price (co-producer, American Movie) described her project as an effort to learn about her neighbors while honoring their “persistent feelings and attitude about life.” Did they have childhoods, jobs, relatives, histories, desires, regrets, sorrows, dreams? Like a good neighbor behind a good fence, Price is too polite to ask — or her subjects too circumspect to answer. One tells her it doesn’t do to get “too chummy” with neighbors, because it’s “nothing but trouble.” Caesar’s Park brims with visible life, but takes that bitter warning too much to heart. (Alamo, 3/15, 4:30pm)
This article appears in March 16 • 2001.
