Two Plains & a Fancy

It would be easy to dismiss “Two Plains & a Fancy” as something trivial, a 90-minute excuse to go camping in petticoats and capture the events that follow and the Colorado scenery alike on beautiful 16mm. At times, that’s exactly what it looks like. It would be equally easy to treat it as a sort of profound 90-minute haiku, plenty of spaces left between images and words with the intent that the audience should fill those gaps with its own ruminations on history, mysticism, exoticism, mortality, spirituality, and the movements of the spheres and the tectonic plates alike. At times, it’s exactly that as well. But to fall into either extreme is to risk one of two equally unsatisfying fates: Inflate its profundity, and you’re part of the joke; Dismiss its pleasures and layers, and you’ll miss a strange and sometimes rewarding experience.

Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman’s (“L for Leisure,” “Blondes in the Jungle”) meandering 1890s road movie follows Milton Tingling, a scarf-collecting watercolorist dandy (Benjamin Crotty), Ozanne Le Perrier, a French geologist (Laetitia Dosch), and Alta Mariah Sophronia, a confidence woman turned mystic (Marianna McClellan) who perhaps hasn’t given up the life of the huckster entirely. After meeting on a train, the three set out in search of the best and most natural spas in the wilds of Colorado. Over the course of a four-day adventure, their destinations grow increasingly remote, guided as they are by freshly-painted signs, rudimentary maps, metaphysical time-travelers, the lichen on rocks, ghosts, the list goes on. That’s the plot, such as it is. The conflict, such as it is, emerges when the two women in the party occasionally butt heads about science and the spiritual realm, though conflict is probably too strong a word, given the mystic’s scam-artist tendencies and the scientist’s occasional use of terms like “psychophysics.”

To call such a story under-developed is to assume that the filmmakers were shooting for something more weighty and just couldn’t get there for one reason or another. That’s not “Two Plains & a Fancy.” This is a film that lives exactly where it lives. That’s perhaps most evident in the production and costume design. When the three spa-goers arrive outside the small mining town that begins their journey, they’re greeted by several signs, freshly painted on machine-cut two-by-four, that read simply “TOWN,” with an arrow pointing them straight. Every sign throughout Colorado looks exactly the same, albeit sometimes with a slightly more romantic brushstroke (as in the one that says, “FANCY PROVISIONS,” with some curvy flair). There’s no sense of being dropped into the past. It’s all self-aware artifice. When they encounter a rancher (Michael Murphy) who Alta Mariah cons for horses and then guiltily and bashfully undeceives, he’s wearing contemporary blue jeans and a very modern bemused expression; their awkward tête-à-tête is interrupted when Milton asks if they can rent “I don’t know what you call it … Luggage for horses?” with an American Express card.

It’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” as told by a series of hip hop skit tracks, only instead of being on a Wyclef Jean album, it’s actually one by Band of Horses or Bon Iver. The emotional impact here doesn’t spring from any emotional investment in the characters or their relationships; there’s simply not enough there there for that to be possible (though Crotty’s engaging, winningly affected performance does sometimes threaten to tiptoe over the line that separates sketch from story). Instead, between moments of surreality and buffoonery, cinematographer Horn and composers John Atkinson and Talya Cooper create a creeping, occasionally overwhelming sense of dread. These landscapes aren’t the stunning expanses of the Great Unknown typical to the western film. Instead, it’s a collection of geological phenomena, complete with crevices and cliffs destined to take the characters farther and farther away from the conveniences three such city slickers would need for survival and closer and closer to that which dwarfs all of us.