“Slowly but surely, ILOVERUSS reveals its true nature as a bittersweet cautionary tale.”

As can be inferred from its stylized title, ILOVERUSS is more of an experimental film than a classic documentary. It was born out of the unusual and long-term friendship between two wannabes at the time they met, in Los Angeles, at the beginning of the millennium: Tova Mozard as the filmmaker behind the camera, and Russell Kingston as the actor in front of it. Both were dreaming of Hollywood (especially Russ, longing for a breakthrough role, whereas Tova had the possibility to build a career and a life in her home country of Sweden), while living in Hollywood’s shadow, as so many other anonymous aspiring dreamers do. The pleasant weather, the swimming pools, the renowned stunning natural light of the city might make you feel like you are in heaven, while actually this is more like purgatory. You wait, and you wait, and then you wait some more, as Russ does while accumulating hundreds of gigs as an extra over the years, always twenty feet from stardom (he likes to say he has worked with every great movie star except for one or two), always remaining unseen and uncredited.

The first part of ILOVERUSS is the closest to a traditional documentary, as it records faithfully the grim and nondescript life of those thousands of invisible employees. Between two jobs on movie sets they are relegated to the far ends of town, where nothing has any kind of distinctiveness – every street, diner, motel, apartment looks exactly the same as the one next to it. Tova films this reality, and Russ furthermore emphasizes it by commenting on how this living environment feels like duplicated compartments for a cloned workforce; a sensation made even more painful by its utter contradiction with the effect of the films produced by the Hollywood ‘dream factory’. Each of the greatest among these movies is unique and left an indelible mark on generations of viewers. Russ himself, in his passion for cinema and aspiration to be a part of it, is a product of this long-lasting influence, as shown in a scene where he reenacts some of the key moments of The Magnificent Seven – in his living room, which is as bland as a green screen.

As the dissonance between Russ’s reality and his dreams becomes more and more unendurable, it eats Mozard’s film up from the inside. It gets closer and closer to the two great Lynchian nightmares about Hollywood and the evil that lurks behind the scenes: Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE – the latter with its title also in capital letters, like a clue to where ILOVERUSS was going all along (another clue, as obvious as it gets, materializes late in the film when its character is fully immersed in the nightmare: INLAND EMPIRE is displayed on the marquee of a movie theatre). The drastic changes in Russ’s appearance make us understand that the editing becomes nonlinear, a means to express how the actor gets nowhere in his career, while at the same time being engulfed in his delusions. Slowly but surely, ILOVERUSS reveals its true nature as a bittersweet cautionary tale, as sudden alterations also start to occur in the way scenes are shot, and the correspondence between Tova and Russ is recorded. Both lead to a feeling of disjointedness between the tangible world and the film, between the land of the living and the realm of ghosts. Russ becomes a part of the latter group, just like the female leads of Mulholland Drive and INLAND EMPIRE: more and more invisible in the maze of Los Angeles, more and more drawn to the movie screen – but not in the way he dreamed it.