Critics reviews

Crotty's movie eventually hits the road and lands in Africa, but it never loses that intoxicating sense of free-floating sensuality that in some ways marks it as the gentler flipside to the systems of always-circulating desires Paul Verhoeven tracks in the far more hectoring Elle. And it's that gentle, polyamorous playfulness that suggests it might be the wiser film as well.

Fort Buchanan is shot and plotted somewhat like porn... The difference, in Fort Buchanan, is that Crotty's style of storytelling has already digested these tropes... With its recycling of soap opera dialogue and its knowing embrace of cliché, Fort Buchanan seems to imply that melodrama applies the same logic to emotion that pornography applies to sexuality—that it creates a world in which vast and spontaneous intensities of feeling are exchanged with prolific frequency and little consequence.

Crotty is hardly the only filmmaker to shoot in the celluloid format in recent years, of course (he joins the company of Wes Anderson, Alex Ross Perry and Joe Swanberg, among others), but there's something especially vivid and tactile about the 16mm images here. Rarely has the mere presence of grain added so much to a film's texture, and even to some degree added to its main themes.

The ensemble's lustful misadventures tend toward laid-back comedy, but the jokes are bittersweet. Binding this community together is the knowledge that children come of age; marriages weaken and crack; and new life goes hand in hand with death. Fort Buchanan is the most mature and traditionally pleasurable outgrowth yet from this ring of promising filmmakers. Its championing of tight friendships rings especially true, too, given Crotty and his associates' ethos of unabashed collaboration.

Loose-limbed but not sloppy, Fort Buchanan — which has a grainy, restless texture, thanks to 16-millimeter film — at times evokes the vitality and experimentation of the French New Wave. And if, at barely more than an hour, the movie initially seems slight, its inconsequentiality might be better viewed as polemical: Fort Buchanan takes place in a geopolitical alternative universe, where bucolic military outposts are the sites of huge love-ins, and the greatest danger comes from gardening spray.

Soapy, sexed-up, and anarchic, Benjamin Crotty's Fort Buchanan may be the only military-spouses comic melodrama as indebted to the Lifetime channel as it is to the oeuvre of Eric Rohmer. Despite these pronounced influences, though, Crotty's riotous feature debut is stamped with a wholly distinct sensibility, one that's simultaneously ludic, queer, mercurial, and concupiscent.

Crotty's Fort Buchanan (2014) is the driest and secretly funniest film [in the Film Society's Friends with Benefits series]... Fort Buchanan is an incredibly French movie, with the requisite sexiness and cinéma vérité stylings, offset by the deep nerdiness of its misfits characters (a crew led by a sad-sap cuckold trying to stay relevant to his bored Army husband), which lends the film a truly weird emotional impact.

The quotidian aspects of the titular camp, a far cry from "don't ask, don't tell"-dom, are innately queered by this bizarrely direct language and Crotty's disorienting editing tactics—namely his use of extreme close-ups to punctuate a given scene when you least expect it. He has fun with the premise, too, teasing the stereotype of the repressed army wife in waiting by having a slew of characters compete for the affections of Roger's tetchy daughter in a series of amusing seductions.

It's both emotionally astute and seriously funny, and draws upon an eclectic constellation of references: Rohmer films, reality shows, and episodic television (Crotty sourced and collaged nearly all of the dialogue from a vast archive of teleplays). Crotty expands upon the exploration of libidinal forces by Abrantes et al. by recasting it as burlesque, at once silly and sincere, built atop a complex pop-cultural matrix.

Focusing on the husbands and wives waiting for their enlisted spouses at a remote camp is an overtly melodramatic start, with their erotic yearnings and escapades being an impelling move from there, but by opening them up through unabashedly fluid sexuality and family constructs, [Crotty] wins out with a feature that is playful formally, not just in temperament.

Former painter Crotty shot mostly in his adopted France for 15 days at a time over four distinct seasons. The surrounding trees and streams are beautiful, but the film's architecture, correlated to mindsets, provides the strongest — and strangest — imagery.

Fort Buchanan, a film steeped in the traditions of the European arthouse, was made by an American, Benjamin Crotty, who lives in Paris and whose aesthetic sensibilities suggest a man who's located the queer poetry in Eric Rohmer's "Comedies and Proverbs" and rewritten the grammar with the help of a post-modern cinephilic thesaurus.