Clean, Shaven
Written and Directed by Lodge H. Kerrigan Cinematography by Teodoro Maniaci
Starring Peter Greene (Peter Winter), Robert Albert (Jack McNally), Megan Owen (Mrs. Winter), Jennifer MacDonald (Nicole Winter), Molly Castelloe (Melinda Frayne)
A film review by Chris Loar
_Clean, Shaven_ is a minor miracle of a movie; it's risky and innovative, and yet it's not esoteric, since the director's aim -- to put you inside the head of a schizophrenic man -- is immediately obvious, and the occasionally obscure way the story unfolds is no impediment to understanding what the film is really about. This is a film that almost no one will enjoy watching, exactly -- and yet it's hard to imagine anyone walking away from it unaffected. It's not an easy or a pleasant film to watch, but it will repay the effort many times over. Because while it is, on the one hand, a fascinating and utterly horrifying trip into the mind of a schizophrenic man, it's also a story about loneliness, isolation, and the vast spaces that lie between ordinary people.
The story revolves around the efforts of a schizophrenic man, Peter Winter (played with astonishing power by Peter Greene) to locate his daughter. Along the way, we meet several lesser players -- Peter's mother, his daughter, and Jack McNally, the detective who is pursuing him on suspicion of a brutal murder. We follow Peter as he is released (or escapes) from a hospital and steals an ancient, decrepit car. We remain in large part attached to Peter's point of view, and Kerrigan makes good use of all the arthouse techniques at his disposal -- eerie close-ups on mundane objects combine with bizarre sound effects and half-intelligible dialogue offscreen, and even the rather ordinary processes of shaving and pouring cream into coffee become genuinely disturbing.
What makes Greene's performance so compelling is the fear and desperation that bleed into his every gesture, each twitch, each blink of a wide, terrified eye. Peter is profoundly alone -- cut off not just from other people but from the stability of daily reality that we all take for granted. The film's most startling effect is to take all these fairly stock film techniques and transform them into something that helps us experience some of that isolation and fear.
This effect is intensified by the enigmatic way in which the story unfolds; the film provides us with nothing especially stable to cling to, either, except for Peter's terrified presence. We identify with him because we have nothing else to cling to. Peter, unfortunately, doesn't have anything to cling to but a damaged photograph of his daughter. In his loneliness and despair, he's drawn to her -- perhaps the only person alive to whom he feels any sense of connection.
Intercut with Peter's search are sequences, often no less disturbing, that focus on the secondary players. These characters are, in their own ways, no less alone than Peter, and the fact that they are "normal" makes their isolation is all the more unsettling. In various sequences we see Peter's mother biding her time alone in her large house; Peter's daughter waiting by herself for her adoptive mother to pick her up after school; Detective Jack McNally drinking alone in a noisy bar. Each of these scenes is created using the same cinematic tools that create Peter's reality -- an erratic soundtrack, disorienting close-ups -- and the consistency of this technique emphasizes the isolation that these characters all have in common.
Ultimately, Kerrigan's emphasis on loneliness and what keeps us apart feels utterly hopeless. The movie creates a feeling that nothing can be accomplished, that serious human contact -- real intimacy -- is impossible, or at least rare. Even the most poignant emotional connection made between characters in this film -- the powerful, immediate bond between Peter and his daughter in the movie's final scenes -- seems to founder on misunderstandings and incompatible illusions. I'm not at all sure I like that hopelessness, particularly after the film has taken such pains to show us that we can get inside another person's head -- that while every man may be an island, we're all capable of building bridges. But that's a minor quibble. The film's real achievement resides in helping us see the world through the eyes of men and women who feel alone; in that achievement lies something unbearably hopeful.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews