‘Leach Lord’ Gives Potent Statement

Los Angeles film maker Eric Saks’ independent movie “Forevermore: Biography of a Leach Lord”--which screens tonight at 8 at the Film-forum, with the film maker present--reminds us how thin many studio-made movies are these days. Saks’ movie, shot for $14,000, is a mock documentary that traces the extra-legal career of the fictional Isaac Hudak through TV science shows, drug smuggling and gambling to his true metier: secretively dumping poisonous wastes.

It has an incredibly rich, packed and well-imagined story line--with enough narrative material for a dozen conventional movies--and enough factual data on waste pollution and science left over for several documentaries as well.

The style, influenced by both Jean-Luc Godard and experimentalist Jim Benning (who appears in the cast), is a collage in which image, sound track and narration blend or clash while hard, bright shots of American landscapes, people and objects collide rigorously. With the frighteningly plausible Hudak at its center, “Forevermore” is a cutting attack on American greed from the ‘50s through the ‘80s and beyond.