Chattanooga FF: The Wheel of Heaven: Getting the Circle Game

A woman caught up in predatory relationships is thrown into a multi-layered world of choices after she discovers a mystical book in a thrift store.

REVIEW:

The Kentucky Fried Movie, a skit movie made in 1977, was a guilty pleasure of mine when I was a bored and lonely college student. It was irreverent and wildly inventive. The Wheel of Heaven, an experimental film in much the same vein, is just as wickedly absurdist, but tries to at least give a shell of plot coherence and some deep meanings to its anthology of skits that feature the same ensemble. It’s a slight step up and thus gets a better critical grade for taking itself a little more seriously.

The basic outline of the plot involves a young, relationship challenged woman, Purity (Kali Russell) who finds the titled book in a second hand shop and is sucked into stories that are illustrative of the novel’s content. It’s all very meta, and keeps TKFM frame that it’s all over the air fodder for a public access TV channel that Purity is watching. There’s an occasional infantile focus on sex, with penis and ejaculation metaphors running rampant- oil rigs drilling, a bombs exploding, jack hammers, etc. Yet, all the bits all have something significant to say under the surface, and have tender and moving moments that give it feels. My favorites are a Star Trek parody where a Captain Janeway is forced to deal with the silent indifference of her mother during a galactic crisis and a Twilight Zone skit that involves Purity confronting assorted versions of herself. Behind the scene footage provides some commentary and add more meta.

The tone is a successful blending of the absurdist and American nostalgia. That’s the middle ground where most folks live life- love it one minute, loathe it the next. Is it anti-humor: where the jokes are funny because they are precisely unfunny? Who know? Who cares! The funny lands most of the time, and that’s the only thing that matter with this kind of skit stuff.

Part of its charm is that The Wheel of Heaven is so resistant to casual narrative. It affirms the random nature of life’s chaos- the sense/nonsence quandary of philosophy. It’s odd, individualistic and human. It’s worth a look.