Strategic

“Women are outside the law.” Lou (Peggy Ahwesh) makes this declaration late in Deliver, when the costs of being so outside are suddenly all too clear. It’s not so much that women are outlaws or otherwise benefit from such status. Instead, being outside means being without recourse or support, subject to abuse, distrust, and loneliness. As she speaks, Lou is looking out on a world of pain, a dead body at her feet, a rape victim whimpering nearby, and miles of Catskills woods stretching between her and the nearest hint of help.

The first film in BAMcinématek’s Migrating Forms series, Deliver is a reworking of John Boorman’s Deliverance. To this end, Lou and her friends have entered the woods in pursuit of an adventure outside their own routines. Academics and filmmakers (played by academics and filmmakers, including director Jennifer Montgomery), the women are determined to embrace “nature,” no matter how strange or strained their efforts. Like the men attempting to swagger in Deliverance, they seek to redefine themselves—whether they mean to meet or challenge gendered expectations is a question. 

Such ambiguity is introduced with the film’s opening epigraph, from Georges Bataille: “At the root of human existence lies the principle of lack.” What’s missing is key to any moment in Deliver, not only with regard to the characters’ narrative arcs—their shifting relationships, their evolving trust and distrust of one another, their multiple needs and desires—but also with regard to the film’s construction. Adopting techniques from classic feminist films and film theory of the 1970s, challenging easy viewer “pleasures,” Deliver breaks up and refracts memorable images from Boorman’s film. Cut short or angled awkwardly, these pieces gesture toward a whole that remains elusive, undermining the concept of coherent violence.

Even before the canoeing trip—on a river called Beaverkill—begins, Jay (Jackie Goss) sits with her husband (Joe Milutis), a filmmaker in search of a subject. “It’s about a cat,” he says of his latest project, “kind of inspired by my own life.” As her eye is caught by his uneasily shifting pigeon-toes and mismatched socks, his slender form receding into their well-worn sofa, her mind wanders. He wonders aloud whether he should shoot the cat—a tabby, he proposes—in black and white or color. Jay sighs, the scene cuts to an unsuccessful effort in the bedroom (she straddles him), then to his question, asked as they lie side by side: “Is it my fault?”

Thus granting Jay (who plays the Jon Voight role) a standard motivation for her journey, the film goes on to develop her differences from her traveling companions. Sleeping in Lou’s car, she’s awakened by her friend’s invitation to check the view: “We’re reaching the most beautiful part of the trip!” Their conversation indicates their opposing attitudes: Jay says. “I just want to get through the day and go home and relax. I believe in sliding, living by anti-friction. You just find something that you can do, really easy, and then you just grease both sides.” Lou, on other hand, believes “in friction. I like to rub up against things.” As the Burt Reynolds character, Lou will go on to act on her belief, using her bow and arrow to kill the woman who sodomizes Bobby (Jennifer Montgomery). 

As in the first film, the rape scene here serves as a climax, rite of passage, and turning point—reintroducing the concept of lack and how to deal with it. Tied to a tree with her own belt, Jay can only watch her friend’s abuse, then argues with Lou as to the next step—how do they handle being “outside the law,” open to ridicule and disbelief if they claim a woman has raped another woman. “Either people wouldn’t believe it,” Lou argues, or “Frankly, I don’t believe most people would care. It could be a media spectacle, but I think ultimately there’s no justice here.”

Like the male characters they mimic and critique, Lou and Jay struggle to survive, make choices they never would have imagined, and contend with skeptical authorities. When Meredith (Meredith Root) suggests Lou is treating the problem like her work, like a movie or “gaming theory,” Lou sees a way in. “Not unlike moviemaking or not unlike video games,” she says, “We have to be strategic. And there are some things culturally which are acceptable and not acceptable and I think we have to play a certain game.”

But this game is different from the one played by Deliverance‘s men. The women have their injuries treated at a birthing center (the doctor, played by the great filmmaker Su Friedrich, explains, “It’s the closest medical facility”). With sounds of women giving birth (“Push! Push!”) filling the background track (as well as a birth on screen), the survivors’ negotiations over what to tell the sheriff take on a particular sort of resonance. Their “rebirth” as violent, self-sufficient, and angry figures is complicated, not heroic or a function of justice, but tragic, brutal, and perpetually troubling. This much is clear when, during the drive home—abstracted into traffic that becomes gurgling water—a deer appears dead in the frame’s foreground. Death and indifference, death and dealing. It’s lack and loss. And it is ongoing.