Pretty Good is Pretty Good! In Praise of the Non-Masterpiece: Crumbs (2015, dir. Miguel Llansó, Ethiopia) by Matt Olsen

The last film in this series celebrating very good, contemporary films that maybe fall ever so short of an absolutely legendary cinematic triumph is a Spanish/Ethiopian co-production which is a combination that is precisely as uncommon as this movie is delightfully nuts. 

Candy – a small, distorted man – walks across a psychedelic-hued, post-apocalyptic wasteland. In the midst of a collection of concrete rubble that may have once been someone’s home, he finds a miniature artificial Christmas tree. Somehow, it’s pristine. Prize in hand, he turns only to face a potential competitor: a gas-masked, mouse-eared man in a vintage WWII Nazi uniform. So, basically, what else do you need to know? 

In the unlikely event that you haven’t been convinced by the above summary of the film’s first three minutes, a more complete narrative overview isn’t likely to change your mind. Crumbs is the story of Candy and Birdy, lovers in a future dystopia who worship at an altar to Michael Jordan and live in a deserted bowling alley beneath the shadow of a rusting, hovering spaceship. When the voice of Santa Claus speaks to them from deep within the bowling lane’s ball return mechanism, Candy treks over a mountain forest, through a derelict train depot, across an abandoned city, and into a defunct zoo to meet the myth himself. In addition, there’s a witch, masked bandits on horseback, and a recurring scene at a pawn shop trading in nineteen-nineties’ knickknacks, toys, and ephemera including a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurine. 

With all that overwhelming oddness, it’s kind of a miracle how well the film is grounded due in no small part to the earnest and empathetic lead characters played by Daniel Tedasse (Candy) and Selam Tesfayie (Sayat [Birdy]). Daniel Tedasse stars in a few of the director, Miguel Llanso’s, films including 2019’s wildly different but similarly outré, Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway. The two actors are never anything less than compelling and their relationship feels both sweet and genuine despite the fervidly eccentric circumstances surrounding it.

There is a tangible echo of Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi classic, Stalker, in Candy’s long and meandering journey to reach the place where wishes are granted. The dire bleakness of Stalker’s desolate Russian landscape is countered in Crumbs by several extended scenes within the lush, impossibly green forests of Ethiopia. There’s a nicely satisfying dissonance between Candy’s forlorn quest and the beautifully-photographed vibrancy of his environment. 

Based on experience, there’s an unfortunate tendency to expect beginner, low budget, off-brand movies to be composed of ragged seams and half-baked ideas that require heaps of generosity and forgiveness. Not here. Crumbs is a solid, confident success that needs no apologies for being wholly unique and wonderful.

Matt Olsen is a largely unemployed part-time writer and even more part-time commercial actor living once again in Seattle after escaping from Los Angeles like Kurt Russell in that movie about the guy who escapes from Los Angeles.