One of the more diabolical trends in recent film promotion & distribution has been the decrease in access to premiere screenings for professional critics in favor of inviting online influencers instead.  The thought is that the younger, less journalistic influencer crowd is more likely review a new movie favorably than a traditional critic—especially when buttered up with parties, booze, and merch—so studios can effectively purchase cheap advertising by elbowing the old-world press out of the way to make room for the brats.  Being neither a paid critic nor a young upstart with a substantial online following myself, I’ve never experienced that kind of blatant buttering-up first-hand, but I did get a small taste of it at last weekend’s local premiere of the microbudget documentary Holding Back the Tide at The Broadside.  The ticket price for the screening included a Happy Hour icebreaker where local shuckers supplied unlimited raw oysters for the crowd to slurp down in excess, supposedly as a live demonstration of the shell-recycling program helmed by The Coalition to Restore Costal Louisiana, which has been repurposing shells from local bars & restaurants to rebuild the state’s eroding coastline.  No matter how many helpful CRCL representatives were around to answer questions via personal interaction or post-film panel discussion about the recycling program, I could clearly see the truth; those oysters were a bribe – a bribe far more valuable than any Los Angeles red carpet meet-and-greet with the voice cast of Mufasa.  They put the audience in a euphoric mood that was impossible to break.

In all seriousness, Holding Back the Tide does pair extraordinarily well with pre-screening oysters, since half of the movie’s credibility relies on a shared understanding that oysters are an exquisitely delicious treat.  Once you agree to that premise, all the movie has to do is explain that they are also an admirable political tool & role model, as exemplified locally by CRCL’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program.  This is not a talking-heads advocacy doc so much as it’s an invitation to mediate on the nature of the oyster as a divine organism for 77 breezy minutes, best enjoyed with the mollusks’ briny taste still lingering on your tongue.  It walks a thin line between poetry and incoherence, but it also makes a convincing enough argument that oysters deserve that awestruck aspiration.  By the time this seafood industry documentary ends on a heartfelt dedication “to The Queer Future,” it earns a hearty “Right on,” from its audience.  At that point, we’ve touched on the oyster’s relationships with and answers to political subjects as wide-ranging as Climate Change, gender identity, communal solidarity, racial justice, and capitalistic overconsumption – each with seemingly enough contextual history worthy of their own standalone doc.  Oyster farmers, vendors, shuckers, and scientists pontificate about their collective fav in fragmentary interviews, focusing mostly on the oyster’s significance to the life & history of New York City.  This hands-on academia is counterbalanced by a more metaphorical appreciation of the oyster’s tendency to change genders mid-life to maintain social balance, as voiced & modeled by trans performers who personify the little wonders. 

Holding Back the Tide is resistant to linear explanations of the oyster’s significance to NYC culture, choosing instead to mimic the circular, repetitive structure of human breath or crashing waves.  Its imagery can be abstract to the point of counterproductivity, such as its gorgeous underwater photography of subway cars being used to restore coastal reefs along with humanmade, recycled oyster beds – which are seen but not verbally explained.  When a seemingly cis-het couple orally exchange an oyster back & forth Tampopo-style, then emerge from the experience as a different pair of lesbian actors, their literalized transformation into The Queer Future is just as confused as it is corny.  However, the living-tableau recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in an oversized oyster shell, reworked as a portrait of modern transgender beauty, is one genius image among many, with clear thematic intent.  It’s especially easy to get on board with the movie’s religious exaltation of the oyster as a Louisianian familiar with its pleasures as a seasonal delicacy and its uses in coastal hurricane protection, maybe even more so than for the average New Yorkers in the target audience.  Love for the oyster is something you feel more than it is something you can articulate, like the stupefying awe for rocks expressed in Deborah Stratman’s recent film Last Things.  Holding Back the Tide is less abrasive & challenging than Stratman’s film, calling back to the more playful 90s NYC indie filmmaking of a Fresh Kill than anything so academically experimental.  Its love for the oyster is raw & heartfelt, and it wants to be shared to its audience so badly it sometimes comes with a real-life oyster bar to help supplement the experience.

-Brandon Ledet