Border Radio: Allison Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss

Allison Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss' Border Radio is one of the most stunning low-budget independent American films ever made. Comfortably occupying a Texas microcosm of punk rock, cigarette smoke, apartments without air conditioning, and cheap bottles of beer, Border Radio does more than just serve as a traditional narrative. Additionally, it also doubles as a kind of anthropological document of the late 80s Texas punk scene. The film focuses on the efforts of a young woman to locate her husband, Jeff Bailey, or, more accurately, the father of her daughter, after he and two other musicians stole $1,000 from a club boss who refused to pay them after a gig. Fearing retaliation, they flee into Mexico. But the story is really of secondary importance to the heart of the story: the decay of the punk rock scene. The characters are pieces of adrift cultural detritus gasping for air. It seems like all of the bands have broken up and the musicians are looking for new projects. But it doesn't seem to matter. In two years, Nirvana would release Bleach and signal the death knell for other kinds of rock music, no matter what Pitchfork may try to say. Jeff Bailey was once a legendary rocker. But now with a kid and a group of thugs looking for him, he exists as a stranger in a strange land just off the Mexican border. His "wife" is determined to find him. But for what? The thrill is gone from their relationship. It seems like she only wants to find Jeff because the search gives her empty life some kind of a purpose. The only other film that I can really compare Border Radio with would be Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. Both films use the bleak Texan desert as backdrops that seem symbolic of their characters' directionless lives. Border Radio's jarring black and white photography evokes the feeling of a fresh hangover destined to plague you for the rest of the day. While films like Slacker, Clerks, and sex, lies, and videotape gain most of the attention as the monuments of the American independent boom of the early 90s, Border Radio is an astonishing film that proves that they may not have been as original as we like to think.

9/10