TWO PLAINS & A FANCY
Two Plains & A Fancy
Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn, 2019
Catalog No.: FTF-081
Length: 90 minutes
Set in remote Colorado in 1893, Two Plains & a Fancy follows three tourists: a Dandy Watercolorist, a Mystic/Reformed Confidence Woman, and a Lady Geologist from France, looking for the perfect geothermal hot spring spa (and finding only ruins). Over three nights and four days, the tourists trek deeper and deeper into the plains, deserts and mountains. And it’s somewhere between a classic Western travelogue and a really epic day at the mall. The tourists have encounters with purported time travelers, underemployed cowboys, a native teen, and ghost whores. They reach the limits of their respective knowledges, and blissfully cross them. And then a geothermal event literally undermines them all. Gorgeous, ominous and ridiculous, Two Plains & a Fancy is a “Spa Western” comedy that only Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (L for Leisure) could make. Their 16mm slacker absurdism clashes against the grandeur of American History, the myths of The West, and Deep Time. The intimacy and directness of their filmmaking grounds the film in everyday reality, creating a vision of the late 19th century that is both eerily familiar and totally absurd.
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn
Written by Lev Kalman, Whitney Horn and Sarah Dziedzic
Produced by Whitney Horn, Lev Kalman, Annalise Lockhart, Nathan Silver and C. Mason Wells
Cinematography by Whitney Horn
Music by John Atkinson and Talya Cooper
Starring: Benjamin Crotty, Laetitia Dosch, Marianna McClellan, María Cid, André Frechette III, Libby Gery, Michael Murphy, Travis Nutting, Kim-Anh Schreiber
WATCH THE FILM
PRESS
“The most imaginative and visionary recent addition to the [Western] genre.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“Imagine a karaoke cover of Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN that becomes, over time, its own beguiling composition… A cosmic joke forged on a Kickstarter budget.”
– Keith Uhlich, The Hollywood Reporter
“Forgoing sepia-tint past-tense pastiche in favor of Super 16mm richer than any filter, the film embodies a past that hardly seems stable. The tone is its most anachronistic element—the sense of humor is an alchemy of laid-back hipster-hangout banter and what Kalman describes as the ‘aggressive absurdism’ of the David Wain school of meta-comedy.”
– Mark Asch, Film Comment
“[A] gorgeous, laugh-out-loud psychedelic Western.”
– Dana Reinoos, Screen Slate
“No verbal or written description can do justice to TWO PLAINS & A FANCY’S best moments, which seamlessly render the absurd and sublime one and the same.”
– Daryl Jade Williams, Slant