Blondes in the Jungle

If you could put a healing balm on the psychic wound that is the ’80s, it would probably contain a dose of the original toxin. Blondes in the Jungle (Best Narrative winner at the 2009 Chicago Underground Film Festival) is just such a remedy […]

This is the perfect vantage point from which to ask: “who are these smug blond preps, and what are they doing in Honduras in 1987?” Well, Amber will tell you, her performatively bored tone a precise hybrid of amateur porn dialogue and jaded ivy-league gossip. She, Chino, and Jerome wander through the rainforest searching for a rumored fountain of youth, carrying a tape deck that never runs out of batteries. The sweet jams that emerge from it precipitate a self-consciously whack animation sequence and other lines of flight. (The music is credited to El Jefe and the Executive Look, a fictional 80s World Beat band made up of contemporary New Yorkers.) The blondes blow coke, bicker, and speculate about all manner of dated pop culture. Mock inane 80s dialogue is intercut with silent observations of jungle life: waterfalls spilling, ants climbing, the wind rustling leaves. This juxtaposition is so plausibly absurd that the critical heavy lifting does itself. A visit from Bret Easton Ellis slyly hooks the blondes in right where they belong socially, even so far away from their places of privilege. But unlike Ellis’s novels, which describe a similarly ingrown and frivolous scene, Blondes in the Jungle takes a panoramic view, at the same time gently revealing hypocrisies and reveling in a surplus of pleasures. —Cine-File