One Day...
2001 · 9m · USA
Directed by Michel Gondry
Genres: comedy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
A man exits a public bathroom and is relentlessly chased through city streets by a human-sized turd who claims to be his abandoned child, crying 'Why have you abandoned me?' until embarrassment gives way to acceptance.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Gondry takes the most repellent possible metaphor for parental guilt and shoots it guerrilla-style through real streets with David Cross in a feces costume—it's the kind of premise that makes you recoil and then realize it's doing something genuinely subversive about shame and responsibility that no earnest drama could touch.
While the scatological provocation reads as pure shock value, there's a disciplined formal restraint beneath it: the real-world location shooting and the escalating emotional sincerity of the chase create an odd lineage with Surrealist cinema's marriage of the grotesque and the poignant.
The single decision that makes this work is Gondry's commitment to treating the absurd literally—no winking, no editing shortcuts, just following David Cross in a turd suit through actual public space with documentary-level directness, which somehow transforms the grotesque into something unexpectedly moving.
Reviews
The best surrealist film about the anxieties of fatherhood since Eraserhead.
A little like Jackass by way of the art house — wonderful absurdity in the turd screaming at the man about being his child.