Dissociated Me

Dissociated Me is the debut feature from Los Angeles writer-director Janaé Rachel Ballot, and the hybrid approach is the best thing about it: part documentary, part autobiography, part fiction, all sitting together in the one film. Ballot grew up in Beverly Hills around the entertainment industry, spent her early years as a dancer and actress, and moved behind the camera at 17. The film had its world premiere at the Reykjavík International Film Festival, and that Icelandic connection runs right through the middle of it.

A dare from an editor

It started as a challenge. Ballot’s longtime friend, the Icelandic editor Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir, who cut John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2 and The Fall Guy, dared her to make a movie about her own life. The trouble was she couldn’t write it. Every time she tried to put that material on the page, she’d have dissociative episodes. So rather than sitting stuck in it, she started filming without a script, and the filmmaking process itself became the movie. Ronaldsdóttir comes on as producer and makes her acting debut in it as well.

That’s what the film is centred on: Ballot wanting to turn her chaotic Beverly Hills past into a movie, losing her mother at 12, teenage addiction, a stalker ex-best friend, and working through every step of it. Writing the script, getting characters involved, casting actors to play her family, going back to her childhood homes for locations. Every step along the way you can feel her getting a little bit more overwhelmed by the process. What really works is that she knows she’s overcomplicating things. As she tries to pin her life down on paper, we watch her realise it and scale it back to something nearer to what reality was for her.

A life without the glamour

The cast play heightened versions of themselves, and that comes across really well, because a lot of the actors go over the top trying to method act, which throws her off while she’s still trying to develop the script. Early on, Ballot talks about how a movie based on her life is meant to be entertaining, enjoyable, presentable and glamorous. But that’s the whole thing: nobody’s life is glamorous, and that’s exactly what comes across here. It shows a life that isn’t glamorous at all, but is very entertaining, with a real sense of living in a fishbowl to it, her family, her history and her privacy all laid open on screen.

The documentary side gives the whole film its grounding: a lot of talking heads rather than shaky cam, and that keeps everything steady. The film never dives into a finished, polished movie product. It’s more about how she’s getting there, how she will get there, and what that final product is going to mean for her. The music clips land nicely too, and the soundtrack is a genuine pleasure.

The crash that found the script

Then, mid-production, Ballot was hit by a car travelling at 35 miles per hour while crossing the street, and the real hospital footage becomes the film’s turning point. Matthew Monelli, one of the cast, started filming her once he knew she was going to be okay, and much of what follows has her acting through post-concussive syndrome while trying to hide a gash on her head. It was going back through that footage during her recovery that she found the shape of the story and finally got a script finished. In the wreckage, she lets go of the story she thought she had to tell and takes her life back.

And that’s the cool little magic trick of it. It sits right on the edge of a hybrid making-of film, with Ballot showing us what’s going on with one hand while the other hand keeps everything a secret, because by the time we get to the end of this documentary, autobiographical, making-of movie, we’ve watched the movie she wanted to make all along.

This is a very raw movie about her life, and it’s a very good, well-edited construction for a debut. It deserves as much praise as it can possibly get. If you love a good documentary, or a film about how films get made, this one is well worth your time. Dissociated Me is coming soon to select cinemas.