The mockumentary standard was probably set by Man Bites Dog in the early Nineties, and since then the basic format has changed very little. Surprisingly little, perhaps. There’s the renegade subject (usually a man) who forms a dangerous relationship with the film crew, then the loss of control over the creative project itself and an escalating, dangerous situation – these features are usually present to varying degrees, from Resurrecting The Street Walker (2009) to Strawberry Flavored Plastic (2019) and beyond. This all brings us to Danny. Legend. God., a debut feature film with all of those elements, including an inability or unwillingness to really break away from the expected. The resulting film is, at 1 hour 45 minutes long, in need of a damn good trim and some dynamic plot elements, rather than the familiar-feeling trek from a bad situation to a slightly worse one.
Danny (Dimo Alexiev) is a larger-than-life local figure in the Bulgarian town where he comes from, and now he’s the subject of a British film project, with a small crew following him around. He is wealthy and influential, and his wealth stems from…well, as far as we really get with that is a tour around an as-yet derelict chocolate factory, but as Danny owns a hotel, a nightclub, large swathes of land and so on and has a hand in local politics., he has all the outward trappings which you’d assume with corruption and criminality, which of course comes out later on. The team quickly get frustrated with Danny’s blustery, coke-addled refusal to follow any sort of script, but he has his own ideas on what he wants to show to them; team member Susan (Kate Nichols) manages to hang on in there until the forty-minutes-of-footage point, and then bows out, leaving the rest of the team more or less as hostages to Danny’s gregarious, obnoxious persona. Given his criminal roots, the remainder of the film sees Danny and the crew variously moving from place to place, introducing minor characters and observing Danny roughing up people who have crossed him.
And talking. Oh god, the talking. I get it: Dimo Alexiev can patter out those rambling, self-aggrandising monologues alright, and he’s playing a type of character who would be just as self-assured and tiresome: full marks on capturing that likeness, but it doesn’t mean it’s particularly engaging to watch or to listen to. Danny speaks nearly all of the dialogue here, or rather shouts it, and the crew meekly record every syllable of it, only occasionally offering a couple of syllables of their own, either to Danny’s face or during the rare moments when they’re alone. One thing the crew does say, though, is that their film is turning out to be incredibly aimless; again, being aware that they’re aware doesn’t neatly fix the issue of this being true. Lots of the dialogue is in Alexiev’s (and writer/director Yavor Petkov’s) native Bulgarian, too, though the code-switching is a little odd at the start of the film; Danny seems to speak in Bulgarian to the English crew even when he’s hoping to communicate something to them, then shifts to English to speak to a fellow Bulgarian, though it looks like he’s at that moment unaware he’s being filmed.
But I suppose the main issue with this particular mockumentary is a now age-old one, which few films trouble themselves to solve or excuse. In common with the now-waning subgenre of found footage – the mockumentary’s slightly sillier cousin – it’s not entirely clear who has edited everything together, how, or why. Someone has troubled to add incidental music to Danny. Legend. God, but not offered a framing narrative or any other rationale for the film in question, which surely almost any documentary would; director Petkov has explained that he chose not to use a voiceover and preferred Danny’s thoughts and ideas to come across organically, but I do still feel there are unanswered questions with this approach. Many of these mockumentaries are neither quite a completely unpolished chunk of unsorted footage, nor a prepared film as such, and it’s frustrating.
There are some valid questions alluded to here, such as the topic of artistic ownership, the familiar issues of strangers in strange lands, and local corruption in countries where this is so often the norm – but these only come into view here and there, rather than being really debated or explored. There’s just too little here that really feels tangible for me, right down to the ending itself. Once the crew begins to say out loud that they’re ‘accomplices now’, the films slips further into a kind of eerie familiarity. Where have I heard that before?
Danny. Legend. God (2020) is now available on VOD platforms in the UK and Ireland and it will be released in North America on 20 July.