Whether or not you can stomach “Butterfly Jam” wholly depends on your taste for sinister whimsy, because that’s about all director Kantemir Balagov serves in his English-language debut, heaping it on in portions as heavy as the savory pie stuffed with potatoes, cheese and herbs known as a delen. You’ll certainly hear plenty about that particular delicacy as well; chances are, you’ll walk out craving both the dish and a feature just slightly more balanced.
Opening this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, the film tracks one of Cannes’ most familiar archetypes: The distinctly ethnic tri-state dirtbag, common across Safdie, Scorsese, Baker and Gray. Here, Balagov and Barry Keoghan imagine a version even more ‘touched’ than most: A Jersey ne’er-do-well who slurs and stumbles whenever he ventures beyond the family diner. He might have some kind of cognitive impairment, or he might just always be stoned.
Whatever the case, he is also doomed — a fate made clear from the film’s very first scene, which finds 16-year-old Temir (Talha Akdogan) announcing his father’s death. Yet, in the first of many red herrings and misdirects, that grim opening quickly fades once Balagov introduces line-cook Azik (Barry Keoghan) in something close to peak form. Perhaps ‘peak’ is overstating it for an oddball immigrant whose world rarely extends beyond a family-run diner and an equally insular social circle, but the hapless cook at least possesses a certain youthful exuberance.
Which is more than you can say for Azik’s American-born son Temir, whose relative proximity in age to the 33-year-old Keoghan hints at a backstory Balagov only vaguely sketches. In a film full of fantastical detours, the notion that Azik somehow survived this long as a single father may demand the audience’s greatest suspension of disbelief. He clearly didn’t get much help from his even more misfit bro Marat (Harry Melling) or his harried sister Zalya (Riley Keough), so chalk up the high schooler’s relative maturity as a real win for the Newark education system.
As a first-generation scion, Temir might be Going Places; Azik, however, is almost certainly not — and the anecdotal, rather ramshackle film borrows its structure from the father’s similarly directionless life. After mastering the delen, Azik receives effusive praise from a Circassian wheeler-dealer whose unopened restaurant already seems doomed. Naturally, the dough boy decides he too is a chef, giving the film’s first half its faintest semblance of narrative momentum as he begins half-assing his American dream. Stark violence changes the register for Act II, though often in unexpected ways. In this world, shock and grief offer no match for quirkiness.
Balagov first conceived the project in his native Nalchik before reimagining it around New Jersey’s Circassian diaspora after fleeing Russia himself — and the seams often show. The film never quite coheres as either a father-son drama or a saga of displacement; instead, it plays more like a jagged character study of a profoundly eccentric man. At its best and worst, “Butterfly Jam” unfolds as a chain of idiosyncratic details and bemused observations: a father who drags his son to a prostitute, then fixates on her houseplants; a man who keeps pelicans and makes butterfly jam; a figure marked for doom, whose end arrives as an arbitrary outcome in a world governed by sinister whimsy.
The 34-year-old filmmaker more deftly controls the film’s formal elements, alternating between stately, amber-hued compositions and more urgent handheld camerawork with shallow focus that reflects the characters’ own removal from the wider world. There’s an odd and fitting symmetry in following a master of one very specific round pastry as his life spins wildly in circles, yet at a certain point — in fact, early and often, all the way through to a closing cameo — the question becomes unavoidable: Why? Why this man, this tone, this story? Why this accumulation of idiosyncratic aimlessness and menacing make-believe?
The film never answers those questions, or really even tries to. Instead, Balagov opts for a kind of musical logic, establishing an unusual register, settling into an uncommon groove, then simply riffing within it. This is fine, though more than a bit cumbersome across nearly two hours. “Butterfly Jam,” in other words, is best served in small doses.
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