Maladies (film)

Maladies is a 2012 film starring James Franco and written and directed by Carter. This was the pair's second collaboration, after Erased James Franco.

Production

Franco plays a character who was an actor in a soap opera prior to the events in the film. The character's history led the director Carter to encourage Franco to acquire a role in a soap opera in real life. Franco took the advice and was able to land a role on General Hospital playing the eponymous character Franco, an artist and serial killer. In interviews, Carter and Franco have explained the decision as an attempt to help Franco understand his character in Maladies, as part of a series of performance art pieces accompanying the film's release, as a joke, and as some combination of all those things. Franco would ultimately use a great deal of the General Hospital footage as part of another experimental film, Francophenia.

Plot

Maladies is divided into three chapters, titled "Feelings", "Symmetry", and "I See You". The course of the narrative lacks a specific timeframe; although the environment, setting and costumes appear designed for the early 1960s, repeated allusions to the cult leader Jim Jones in the film are somewhat jolting, as the footage of Jones used is from 1978. The film follows the foibles of its four main characters as they seek to resolve "maladies" that make it difficult for them to relate with one another and cope with themselves.