| CAMERA OBSCURA : Kyle Henry's 'Room' [7/10] |
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Though one of the more intriguingly unusual, thought-provokingly original and, in the end, intellectually stimulating American independent movies of the year, Austin-based writer-director Henry's Room - co-produced by, among others, Michael Stipe - emphatically won't be to all tastes. Indeed, it should perhaps carry a health warning to inform potential viewers that if they demand conventional narrative closure, they should stay well away. It isn't giving too much away to state that, while structured as a teasing paranoid thriller - which we're led to believe will culminate in some "oh-that's-what-was-going-on!" 'reveal' - Room leaves the audience with plenty of work to do as the credits roll. Henry can't be faulted in terms of ambition - with this, his first full-length fiction feature, he takes as his subject-matter the basic concept of narrative itself: the way individuals in modern society see their own lives in terms of stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, and how this can lead them down what turn out to be cruelly disappointing cul-de-sacs. The audience is likewise constantly trying to fit together the fragments of what seems to be a puzzle, one whose solution may encompass current geo-political events and/or psychological abnormalities and/or sinister, perhaps even extra-terrestrial involvement. And we are rewarded for our efforts - it's just that this reward takes a rather different form from the one most of us were probably expecting. The plot, as befits a film with a mid-length running time, is fairly straightforward. Julia (Cyndi Williams) works in a bingo-hall near her home, in a suburb of Houston, Texas. A haggard-looking mother of two daughters, Julia is perhaps in her mid-30s but could pass for a decade older. Her husband Bobby (Kenneth Wayne Bradley) is sympathetic and attentive, but Julia is rapidly reaching the end of her tether. Christmas is looming; she's underpaid and overworked; is underappreciated at home; conscious that she's getting no younger, no thinner, no happier. And she's also suffering from a series of increasingly severe migraines which cause her to black out. During such spells, Julia has repeated fugue-state visions of a large, semi-dilapidated Manhattan-style loft-space - the "room" of the title (which is oddly reminiscent of the loft from Michael Snow's avant-garde classic Wavelength). After one particularly spectacular migraine, which causes her to run her car off the road, she impulsively steals several thousand dollars from her work safe (shades of Psycho's Marion Crane?), buys a ticket to New York, and starts looking for that mysterious 'room'. She finds rather more - and less - than she'd bargained for... Henry sets the tone for Room with the opening titles - moody, distorted, monochrome images; low-key electronica on the soundtrack (the hypnotic, enticingly downbeat score features music by three similar-sounding bands: The Lysergic Dream; The Crack Pipes and Ioscil); snatches of news-reports covering events in the middle-east. Throughout the film characters are shown semi-listening-to or semi-watching such reports on the radio or TV, most of which involve Iraq and/or terrorist atrocities. You don't have to be the most alert or attentive figure to pick up this insistent background 'noise' - and you don't have to be eagle-eyed to see that, when Julia jets out of Houston, she does so from 'George Bush Intercontinental Airport.' Her choice of destination is also, clearly, no accident: her 'mission', which she herself doesn't understand (and recalls Richard Dreyfus obsessively seeking Devil's Tower in CE3K), is clearly something to do with 9/11, we surmise, something to do with the 'War on Terror'. Is she being 'controlled' by some unseen masterminds wielding hyper-advanced electronic equipment - when Julia has her visions, it's like looking through a slightly faulty CCTV camera. Might these 'controllers' perhaps even be Not Of This Earth? (The Phildickian 'what is reality?' aspect points towards the latter possibility). Clues and hints pile up at every turn, disorienting us as much as they do Julia (and we're with her every step of the way thanks to William's convincingly careworn performance in what is, remarkably, her debut feature-film.) One seemingly promising set of 'leads' brings Julia not to the much-anticipated 'Room' but to a hippy-dippy self-help session; a visit to a tarot-reader provokes an even more unsatisfactory outcome. Dry, sly humour of this sort abounds, tinged with flecks of unsettling horror - the tarot visit is a genuinely unsettling vignette, thanks to Carlos Trevino's cameo as the bearded, volatile fortune-teller (Suzanne Savoy also manages to steal her scenes as a straight-talking real-estate broker). Henry builds an ambiguous sinister/comic atmosphere that borrows a little from Lewis Carroll and/or fairytales (the diminutive Julia even meets a 'giant' late on), but which is also decidedly reminiscent of a Don DeLillo novel, or even Thomas Pynchon, where semiotics (the study of signs and signifiers) becomes very much an end in itself, the signs and signifiers becoming a self-perpetuating network of their own and not necessarily leading to any great ultimate truth. And the final, literally head-spinning scene works both ways: Julia has either reached yet another daft dead end, or she has found what she was looking for, but has found it within. The former is a the more uncomfortable interpretation, as if this downtrodden victim of brute American capitalism was being mocked for daring to want more, to want an answer (the climax also mocking our desire for neat answers). The latter 'explanation' is, in some ways, more ostensibly optimistic - although it might actually also signify that there isn't really any 'way out', that even the illusion of escape is a sour, sick, elaborate joke. The film provides ample evidence for either analysis - indeed, for many more depending on the viewer's subjective reaction, presuming this response is more than just an exasperated, cheated, I-want-my-money-back "huh?!" Neil Young 4th December, 2005 ROOM : [7/10] : USA 2005 : Kyle HENRY : 71 mins (timed) seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), 2nd/3rd December 2005 - with thanks to Pascale Ramonda - seen as a result of the film being programmed at the Ljubljana Film Festival |
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