A film that is not a film. It looks more like one of those allegorical tales that the ancients told each other around the fire, and which had the ultimate aim of providing community members with the tools - cognitive, emotional - to cross the forest and return home alive. Poetry, bluntly put, is born like this.
 
Behold, Upstream Color is placed in this wake, that of metaphor and metonymy, of allegory and simulacrum, because it tells something that is actually something something else but above all something beyond.
As in Primer, here too the level of narration is articulated, complex, difficult, at times inaccessible - but there is no presumption or sterility in Carruth: as for Lynch, for him too the complexity of the staging is bent to the requests and needs of the story, there is no trace of arrogance, or at least I didn't see any.
 
And I felt challenged, put to the test, disoriented, lost, rediscovered, abandoned , alone but above all sun, because there is a lot of light in Upstream Color. This type of film has always fascinated me. There is only one thing I ask of art, in each of its manifestations: overwhelm me. Submerge me, pass through me, make the earth collapse beneath my feet, tear the sky apart and make every universe collapse. And that's what I try to do every time: make the film (or the book, the painting, the sculpture, etc.) my own. I don't like explanations and captions, I instead adore ambiguity, opacity, darkness, "the vague and the indefinite" (Leopardi), because like Verlaine I want "shades only, not colour".

But what is Upstream Color?
What story does it tell, and above all "how"?
It is a story of worms and pigs.
Of blue flowers and rolling stones .
I believe that it is a reflection on the incessant dialogue between the partiality that we are and the totality to which we aspire.
It is a film about memory (poetry returns, because it was born precisely as mnemonics) , because perhaps those pigs represent - almost as an objective correlative - the physical "place" where fragments of the past reside, in particular traumatic and catastrophic events (those which, in one sense or another, have determined profound changes in our being at , and think about the world).
Those larvae, first inserted into the girl and then extracted by her and implanted into the pig, could tell precisely this: the (vital?) need to remove certain memories, but with which one must remain in contact, do not abandon them, because it is only through the re-elaboration of mourning (every type of mourning: the end of a love, the loss of home, of work, the end of school, a new beginning) that one can give meaning to past, and therefore to the future, and therefore to the present.
 
She and him – and all the others, as seen in the finale – had to travel into that hell which is their own wounded heart in order to , perhaps, in some way, give meaning to one's existential journey. [...An Orphic descent into the world of the dead, those who populate our mind, the ghosts of the past and the future, of language, of the word of God, of our absurd being in the world...]. And they do it by loving each other, amidst an infinity of fears and fears (precisely because they are repressed without awareness), yet holding hands, united against the world (the scene of the two of them embracing in the bathtub, with the gun and some supplies, is splendid as if the apocalypse was coming and involved only the two of them – who are the entire cosmos).
 
There is nature, in all its possible senses: the one made of trees, flowers, worms, mud, rivers and human nature, whatever it is, which in reality is what gives meaning to "nature" and anything else. Because nature (not just human nature) is technological.
Those sounds and noises that are recorded, as if we were searching for something primordial, the breath of God, are the song that we bring in. I mean, we find ourselves on the analogue side of existence, but we are digital beings (the word: the ghost): we are harmonies of opposites, almost in a Heraclitean sense, we are pervaded by selfish and violent instances and by altruistic and sublime instances, we are our genes and we are free will, we are insignificant worms and we are omnipotent divinities.
This is our condemnation, this is our salvation.
But then it happens that on the train on which our life travels, at a certain point, we meet someone, and we recognize in their eyes our own desire for the world, our own pain, and then it happens: we fall in love.
And with love come all the other monsters.
/>And then we dig inside ourselves, with a kitchen knife, because under the skin we see the larva running that we had to swallow when we came into the world (the initial scene, perhaps, can be a metaphor for this: coming to light, born from a society about which we must learn everything - because we are always born amidst trails of blood and glimpses of light, amidst tears and confusion, because, as Wislawa Szymborska says, "we are born without experience, we die without habituation").

In short, Upstream Color, my Usptream Color, is a story of shattered identities trying to put themselves back together. It is a dialogue between partiality that yearns for totality, between the duality of our human being and the infinity of our divine being. Existential precariousness and the need to cheat death. The need to remove and the need to reunite with the repressed. The crazy possibility of sharing one's life with someone who - in the middle of the mud, dirty with defeats and failures, bathed in hope and fears - we can call "my love".
 
Usptream Color is a story of catastrophes, or moments of rupture, of morphogenesis, of changes in shape. I think of the man who puts newborn piglets (from the pig in which the worm extracted by the girl was inserted) into a jute bag and throws them into the river, causing them to drown (among other things, this event triggers a sense of loss and anguish in the couple, making the two feel besieged by an impalpable force which is perhaps the sense of guilt, the feeling of having lost something important, perhaps forever).
 
These fractures, these quantum leaps that fragment the moment and make it eternal , are the moments of choice (see also the splendid Mr Nobody) - but also the choice of the moment - they are the moments in which the self splits, like every atom, and generates further, innovative, other existential trajectories. When the fracture comes from horror (because we chose not to choose, because we remained silent or shouted too much, because we did or didn't do that thing, because this or that other thing) then the self follows paths of death, dirty with mud, and we spend our lives in the pig pen, but with the awareness, excruciating and unbearable, of the immensity of the world that we will never see, and which will always be within us.
 
Upstream Color is all this, or rather: it's none of this.
This is just my story, my journey around a rolling stone.
Because I'm confused and I'm scared, it's night and I'm alone in the woods .
And I desperately search for poetry to show me the way home.