PAPERHOUSE
A film review by Shane R. Burridge
Copyright 1995 Shane R. Burridge
1989 92 min
Catherine Storr's cult children's novel MARIANNE DREAMS had already been made into a British television serial, ESCAPE INTO NIGHT, fifteen years before this film version appeared. While the television adaptation followed the plot and ideas of the story faithfully, Matthew Jacobs' new screenplay takes liberties which fans of the novel may not enjoy. The premise is basically the same: A young girl (named Anne in the film) falls sick and is confined to bed for several weeks. She begins to have dreams about drawings she has made in a sketchbook and, upon discovering that a boy (Elliot Spiers) in her dreams actually exists in the outside world, becomes convinced that the control over her dreams is linked with the direction of real events.
Rather than the naive child of the novel, Anne's character is a rebellious sub-teen whose fantasy dreamworld has now been redefined as Freudian subconscious. It's a difficult role for audiences to sympathize with, but Charlotte Burke plays the part convincingly. In fact it is less her growing relationship with Marc (the boy) than her ambivalent feelings toward her absent father that determines the direction of the story. These feelings cause her to (unconsciously?) recreate him as the agent of her sexual awakening - he becomes literally the man of her dreams. The climax of the story, in which her father drags her from the paperhouse employs imagery of a vaginal (fiery fissures opening in the ground around them) and phallic (the lighthouse waiting for her in the distance) nature, but is more `climax' than conclusion. The film seems to end three or four times before Anne finally stands before the lighthouse - in the real world, this time - at the edge of a cliff (she is at the brink of womanhood) with her arms open, inviting what may come. This subtext makes for an interesting examination of the emotional confusion associated with the onset of puberty, but in doing so loses the children's audience that might have otherwise been attracted to the story. Neither, however, does the film seem intended specifically for adults. The real appeal, as in the book, comes from watching Anne's drawings materialize three-dimensionally in her dreams, and Bernard Rose handles the transitory sequences well, imbuing the dream (later nightmare) sequences with their own plausible reality.
Shane Burridge 1995
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