Clean, Shaven
|  Lodge Kerrigan's directorial debut, Clean, Shaven, is a daring and disturbing cinematic experiment that takes us inside the mind of a struggling schizophrenic for an unrelenting 80-minute ride. Kerrigan mixes a shaky narrative filled with gaping holes begging to be filled by the viewer's assumptions with an amazingly dense and inventive aural assault that suggests the gray middle zone between reality and a broken mind's perception of it. The film was shot in 16mm on a minimal budget over a two-year period, which immediately brings to mind another great experimental work about twisted subjectivity by a first-time feature filmmaker: David Lynch's Eraserhead (1978). Yet, whereas Lynch's film was a surreal headfirst dive into explicit dream imagery, Kerrigan's film is a more straightforward and harrowing depiction of mental illness.Peter Greene, who most will recognize as the nefarious Zed from Pulp Fiction (1994), gives an amazingly detailed and sympathetic performance as Peter Winter, a schizophrenic young man who has recently been released from hospital confinement of unknown duration. Early in the film, Kerrigan throws one of the first and most disturbing narrative curveballs when he suggests that Peter kills (or at least hurts) a young girl. We never see the violent action, but we hear it, which allows Kerrigan to exploit one of the cinema's primary stylistic means of avoiding on-screen violence. By keeping the violence within the realm of the aural, which is where we are most connected to Peter's mental illness, he makes the violent action completely ambiguous. Perhaps it took place, perhaps it didn't. The general thrust of the story is Peter's desire to reconnect with his daughter, Nicole (Jennifer MacDonald), who was adopted by a caring foster mother (Molly Castelloe) while he was in the hospital. Peter's stern, disapproving mother (Megan Owen), who treats his illness like a bad decision on his part, refuses to tell him what has happened to Nicole even though she orchestrated the adoption. Meanwhile, a troubled police detective (Robert Albert) is tracking down a serial killer that may or may not be Peter. The story, however, is of relatively limited importance, and if anything is the film's primary weakness: For all its ambiguity, the film relies on some striking coincidences that ring false in an otherwise affecting film. Kerrigan's brilliance as a filmmaker lies in his complete immersion in the subjectivity of his protagonist, which makes him both sympathetic and completely alien (the film is much like Roman Polanski's Repulsion). We watch with horror as Peter digs at his own body with scissors and knives trying to rid himself of tiny radio transmitters he believes are buried under his skin and fingernails; it is both sad and repulsive, yet it is impossible not to watch. Kerrigan's visuals alternate between banal landscapes and abstract images of everyday objects--a bucket of fishheads, a tomato being sliced, a cigarette butt. He uses extreme close-ups to make the ordinary seem peculiar and gross, which sets us on constantly edge. As Peter wipes at his jacket and tugs at his tie, we recognize that same sense of discomfort, except his is an all-enveloping worldview that he can't escape when the film is over. Our immersion is complete, which is what makes Clean, Shaven such an extraordinary film.
Copyright ©2007 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © The Criterion Collection | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(3.5)
