354 Clean, Shaven

[Steven H]

Gracious me, it seems everyone was surprised by Clean, Shaven. I might have to pick this one up (for what it's worth, I wasn't even going to vote in that category... slim pickins this year, I think.)

I went back and reread the posts in this thread, and didn't come up with much to go on (though I forgot "mental mike" was actually schizophrenic.) cdnChris says "compelling and unnerving film" and "student film" is bandied about as a descryption in a few posts. So how about all of you people that were surprised tell what about?

[porquenegar]

What really got to me was the use of sound to make you really feel the disorientation and sheer manic-ness of the main character. The only other movie that I can think of of where the sound had a similar effect on me is Stalker.

There is a lot of hand-held camera work and the film is really gritty looking which is probably where the student film comments come from.

[jbeall]

While Peter Greene is the only professional (read: 'good') actor in the film, it's a really fascinating depiction of schizophrenia. The alienation from himself and the attempt to overcome it (he covers all the reflective surfaces on his car so he won't have to look at his reflection), the alienation from his own body, as if it was a machine (leading to the most gruesome scene in the film), it's pretty dead-on. The use of sound is really interesting, too. Definitely check out the extras.

If you're interested on reading some stuff on schizophrenia, I recommend the following:

R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (this is really a classic, and Penguin has a cheap paperback edition available)
Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism This is the book I used to learn about schizophrenia. It's hard to find, but worthwhile.

[Mental Mike]

I disagree, jBeal, when you say the body is a machine that the schizophrenic main character is alienated from...and this leads to the violent conclusion...I do not think this treatment was dead-on, as you say...

...the fact is that the vast majority of schizophrenics are non-violent, and the film's major weakness is the violent climax, something that is atypical behavior for a schizophrenic...when I saw it I felt it was just filler to conclude the movie and not very plausible..

[jbeall]

I disagree, jBeal, when you say the body is a machine that the schizophrenic main character is alienated from...and this leads to the violent conclusion...I do not think this treatment was dead-on, as you say...

...the fact is that the vast majority of schizophrenics are non-violent, and the film's major weakness is the violent climax, something that is atypical behavior for a schizophrenic...when I saw it I felt it was just filler to conclude the movie and not very plausible..

Perhaps this alienation isn't sustained throughout the movie, but that's fine; schizophrenia sometimes produces contridictory symptoms. I was referring specifically to the scene where Greene's characters believes that he has a radio transponder embedded in his finger, and cuts the fingernail off to get it. Not only is it visually gruesome, but I can only imagine that it'd hurt like hell! However, the character doesn't even look like he's in pain.

[jon abbey]

just saw this for the second time, and I remember enjoying it decidedly more the first time. the sound design is obviously the main drawing point, and it's pretty good, but I do have to wonder what the master of radio grabs, Keith Rowe, could have done here, as opposed to Hahn Rowe (who does do a reasonably good job).

the acting besides Greene is lousy, and the story is really too bare bones. even if you approach it as a pure character study, we don't learn nearly enough about Greene, IMO.

all in all, a good idea, but I think one that could have been decidedly better executed, even on a minimal budget (and it couldn't have been too minimal with how many people are thanked in the credits).

[jon abbey]

a great book I read recently dealing with schizophrenia was Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness by Greg Bottoms, highly recommended.

[LightBulbFilm]

I just watched this and all I can say is "Wow." What an amazing and mezmerizing film. I've never been drawn into a character so effectively ever before. I don't know what else to say... It was just amazing all around. The DVD is great as well. The video essay by Atkinson really picks up the pieces that I couldn't place with the film and really adds to the whole experience afterwards. This film is going to linger with me... for a long time.

[Lemmy Caution]

I liked it enough that I picked up Keane.

Keane is amazing, IMO

A very delayed reaction on my part, but I thought Keane was a much better film than Clean, Shaven, in the same vein. Very good atmosphere and creepy in parts. I'll definitely re-watch Keane after a while.

Sidenote: I was in a dvd shop the other day and noticed a young French couple trying to decide whether to buy Keane or not. So I gave them a very brief two-sentence review and recommended it. They seemed like they could handle something out of the mainstream. I wonder what they thought.

[mmacklem]

I disagree, jBeal, when you say the body is a machine that the schizophrenic main character is alienated from...and this leads to the violent conclusion...I do not think this treatment was dead-on, as you say...

...the fact is that the vast majority of schizophrenics are non-violent, and the film's major weakness is the violent climax, something that is atypical behavior for a schizophrenic...when I saw it I felt it was just filler to conclude the movie and not very plausible..

I just within the hour finished watching this movie, and I just finished listening to the Video Essay by Michael Atkinson, and this comment from earlier in the thread reminded me of something I was curious to hear others' input on. (To be continued inside spoiler tags...)

Spoiler

Michael Atkinson refers back to the initial scene where the girl with the ball looks into the car, and Peter Winter gets out of the car and we hear sounds of a girl screaming, but don't see any accompanying images to support those sounds, so that we very quickly are forced to question the reality of the sounds we are hearing. Given the fact that this initial incident is never brought up again (presumably the murdered girl is not the same as the one with the ball, since they don't look anything alike), I think that we are intended not to draw any conclusions about what happens in the initial scene.

Given that fact, how much really can we extrapolate from any of the scenes involving the Peter Winter character? In particular, at the end of the movie, the cop is drinking his soda water in the bar, clearly upset, and clearly also losing a bit of control over the sounds in his own head. And the scenes where he hits the steering wheel repeatedly, and draws his gun as he's driving, obviously show that he's slowly (or not so slowly) losing it as well, possibly due entirely to the pressure of the case, but also possibly due to his own deteriorating mental condition. How sure are we intended to be that we can trust the events we see of Peter Winter, and that they are actually happening as opposed to visual backstory that the cop is creating in his own head as he tries to track down "Peter Winter"?

While the standard interpretation of this movie is that there is a formal divide within the film between the conventional plotline outside of Peter Winter's head, and the less trustworthy scenes inside his head, I wonder if even that is too strict, and that the conventional section of the film is actually also a less trustworthy version of events in the cop's head. What got me thinking about this was how the cop seemed upset at the end after the violent conclusion, and yet if his perspective was intended to be trustworthy then he should have just solved the case he was working on, in which case even the violence would seem to have inspired a different response than the one he has.

Am I going too far on this? Probably, but I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts.

[mmacklem]

Oops, forgot to tie the above comment to Mental Mike's quote:

Spoiler

If we aren't intended to take as trustworthy even the plot aspects of the Peter Winter scenes, then consider the violent ending in relation to your observation about typical behaviour of schizophrenics: Peter Winter is with his child, the cop is slowly losing it over the course of the movie, he comes across PW with his daughter, and hastily shoots him. Afterwards, upset and sitting at the bar, he is constructing a version of how this could have been a justifiable response: what if PW was dangerous and violent? what if he was armed? what if the daughter was in danger?

How far back does the cop need to go in constructing a backstory for the event of having killed a man in front of his daughter in order to make himself feel justified in having done so? Is that what we are seeing in the movie?

[Mental Mike]

In general, I have "ammunition" against the media (especially film) for their portrayal of schizophrenic illnesses... an easy way to explain a villain's evil doings is to make him a schizophrenic... explaining Travis Bickle's violent explosions and isolation in Taxi Driver as due to schizophrenia is not very interesting and also reduces people living with schizophrenia to fitting a stereotype! (i.e. as dangerous, social deviants)...

....Taxi Driver is a great film, but couldn't Bickle's problems be better explained by his prior experiences in Vietnam? His Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

...In fact, schizophrenics are so tortured by their own experience of symptoms that they are incapable of planning or scheming to commit deviant behaviors...if their behavior is "deviant", it mostly reflects what is in the "here and now" as their minds are being flooded by the symptoms...

...Hollywood, please find better motivations for serial killers, madmen and other kinds of villains, rather than using mental illness to explain their problems!

[miless]

I would love to know MM's opinion on John Cassavetes' A Woman Under The Influence (a film that could be considered the opposite of a typical "mental illness picture"), or Cronenberg's Spider (where the lead character may have done something, but he's more a danger to himself than to anybody else)

edit: nevermind about Spider, I just went back through the old posts and discovered MM's old post regarding Spider.

to ask of another film, however, what are your (Mental Mike's) thoughts on Lodge Kerrigan's Keane?

[CSM126]

Just finished watching this and now I'm sorry I waited so long to get around to seeing this film. I thought it was absolutely fantastic. Great performance from Peter Greene (and I liked the rest of the cast, too, unlike some other posters), remarkable editing and sound mixing, and such a surprising amount of sympathy and empathy that it takes what could have been a clinical psycho-drama or a nasty horror story and makes it instead into something beautiful and heartbreaking. This is really great film making right here. I can already tell that this disc is one I'll revisit endlessly.

[domino harvey]

See, this movie was just like every movie that comes on Sundance at 2AM-- mostly bad acting (except the lead) and listless nothingness in an attempt to mask a non-existent budget and short-film-length plot. The only thing I got out of it was the Soderbergh-aided commentary.

[Saarijas]

Knowing someone with schizophrenia, I may have an unfair advantage. But hte accuracy in which this movie depicts your 'average' schizophrenia is alone an accomplishment praise worthy.

The other bit that hinted at greatness from this movie to me was the plot. It's good solid story telling, not obfuscated in twists and turns and confusion. It's straight up and keeps you attention. Something many 'indie' and modern movies have trouble doing. Really, in my opinion, it's one of the best examples of straight up story telling I have seen in some years.

[Svevan]

See, this movie was just like every movie that comes on Sundance at 2AM-- mostly bad acting (except the lead) and listless nothingness in an attempt to mask a non-existent budget and short-film-length plot. The only thing I got out of it was the Soderbergh-aided commentary.

If Dom is serious, I'm in agreement. "Listless" is the key word; tiring is another. Some interesting techniques and moments, but overall a very empty film.

[LeeB.Sims]

I finally decided to chime in here regarding this film. I only recently watched it and it’s become one of my favorites for all the reasons mentioned. I came here to check out the discussion and I have some thoughts I wanted to share.

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. Regarding Mental Mike’s assertion that the vast majority of schizophrenics are non-violent and taking exception to their depiction as such in the media- I fully understand this contention and feel that it is totally justified, however I don’t feel that Clean, Shaven is a valid culprit. In fact I believe Lodge Kerrigan understands very well that these prejudices exist and is using this film (and Keane for that matter) to expose them.

The scene in the opening involving the girl with the ball and the ambiguous offscreen screaming manipulates the viewer to jump to unnecessary conclusions about Peter’s guilt in both this phantom crime that may or may not have happened and the real crime that later becomes the focus of the detective’s investigation. As the film progresses and we learn the extremely untrustworthy nature of the sounds we are hearing we start to question our own assumptions. The detective takes over for us at this point and without the benefit of being immersed in the subjectivity of the film he quickly deduces Peter is guilty without even really pursuing any other suspects. Even when he hears from forensics that the evidence is inconclusive he still continues to pursue Peter as the killer. In fact, he does not abandon this belief until the end when he finds the conspicuous looking bag in the trunk and it is revealed to contain only clothes. Up until that point he seemed pretty sure that he had done the right thing, even whistling happily to himself as he unlocks the car and begins processing the interior.

Peter had a serious aversion to mirrors or anything that would reveal his reflection. The detective’s psychic deterioration was, in my interpretation, meant to hold a mirror up to Peter. Which one is really crazy? Which one is really more likely to snap and do people harm? Peter endears himself to us as viewers not only through the empathy his disorder invokes throughout the film, but through the mistreatment he repeatedly experiences- his frigidly cold mother, the staring, judgmental eyes of the people he passes in the car and the clerk and cop at the adoption agency, and perhaps most blatantly the withering librarian. “Did he hurt you?”…”Well, no, but he made me afraid he was going to. He was the scariest person I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Finally, we see Peter’s interaction with his daughter Nicole and we realize that he is nothing close to the volatile, dangerous monster that we made assumptions about in the beginning… but it’s too late for us to tell the detective. As Peter drives in the car with Nicole and discusses her dead mother, he says “There are people out there who want to hurt you, everywhere.” He says this not only because that has been his experience in life, but because it’s a cold hard fact of our society. This realization finally dawns on the detective when he discovers he very likely gunned down an innocent man. He stares at the gruesome locals at the bar and replays the prior scenes that he thought he had interpreted so clearly, so correctly… and he more or less echoes Peter’s words of warning to his daughter: “There are people out there who want to hurt you, everywhere.” The murderer of that little girl could have been anyone.

One last aspect of this film that I don’t see mentioned yet in much detail is how tragic the end of this simple story really is. Some people in this thread mentioned that the inevitable violence at the end seemed too convenient and gratuitous, but I think the emotional impact it has is invaluable to the film as a whole experience. There were several moments toward the end that made my heart literally catch in my throat because of the sorrow I felt. When Peter is lying broken on the ground and he calls out “Nicole? It’s okay baby. It doesn’t hurt.” I almost completely lost it. Maybe because I have children of my own and I understood with stark clarity that immediate impulse to make sure that the emotional damage to your child is minimized when you die. It’s strange really how having children can paradoxically make you feel immortal and painfully aware of your own mortality at the same time.

This emotional thread then carries over to the scene with Peter’s mother hanging up the laundry and breaking down. Here is a woman who has shown absolutely no hint of her true character other than being hard as nails and cold as the dead fish she pragmatically guts, and yet in this moment she is simply a mother who has lost her little boy. Finally, the last image of the film… Nicole trying to reach the receiver in her father’s head using the CB on the boat, completely devastated me and I couldn’t help choking on a sob. She shows us, the audience, so simply and with such brutal innocence that she never once passed judgment on her father. She never once questioned his intentions with her, considered the possibility that he might be dangerous, or even doubted the possibility that he might have a receiver in his head. He was just her daddy.

[exte]

Paragraph breaks? Mods?

[Marcel Gioberti]

I'm in agreement with the guy everybody slated from DVDFile and Domino Harvey.

Terrible acting (sans Greene, but he was overacting half the time), overly manicured photography (one ECU required the mother character to remain virtually paralyzed so the DP could get the shot), a non-existent script supervisor (the supposedly "dead" little girl twitches and breathes like she's having a conniption fit), and a story that felt like one ginormous David Lynch-inspired contrivance. So, in the end, this was indeed a neat idea for a short film that the filmmaker belabored to make into 79 embarrassing minutes.

Oh, I forgot about production design. Has anybody ever seen real, honest, genuine article filth? Peter's mother lives in a house that just screams production design. Let's see here: Soiled walls? Check. Mattresses without sheets? Check. Disheveled belongings on the floor? Check. Solitary light bulb dangling from the ceiling? Check. "Wow, this looks creepy, hurry up so we can take pictures of it!"

I hate to use the word, but alas, pretentious.

#-o

[Daniel B.]

Clean, Shaven is one of my favorite films. I'm wondering if anyone can recommend similar films? And by similar films, I don't mean films about schizophrenia. I mean more similar in look and feel; especially look. Think composition style and atmosphere.

[knives]

I mean this in the most positive way possible, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to complete this one. It touches a very personal nerve so kudos on the super accurate depiction of Schizophrenia. It's reminding me of The Brown Bunny actually. Now if only that cop subplot was taken out.

[John Cope]

I like the cop subplot because it doesn't amount to anything. Oh, wait, maybe I shouldn't have said that if you haven't finished it.

[knives]

Don't worry, I finished the movie about an hour and a half after that post. That the cop story didn't resolve in the specific way it did may have actually made me more angry. It's appropriate for what the film was going for, but I just really am against it on how useless it becomes. That I suppose makes it a success especially compared to a ton of other similar subplots out there. The film has a lot of complex emotions going for it that would be rewarding on the second viewing I'll never give it (seriously not since Baby Jane has a beach climax been so hard to swallow). I appreciate the ringer it put me through and not just in the self mutilation scenes, but even more so in the moments of interaction. I know a guy who's son has schizophrenia so watching the bread making sequence was what got me to step away the first time. I'm not sure if I'm more angry or disturbed, but either way I think this came out as a surprise success in the collection.