Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Albert Birney, Kentucker Audley
Starring: Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney, Linas
Phillips, Constance Shulman
When John Carpenter made his anti-capitalist satire
They Live in 1987, it was a very different world. We were
a lot more innocent of the fact that we were living in a consumerist
world, and advertising back then was far more blatant. It was a time
when you popped out to put the kettle on during an ad break on your
favourite TV show. I recall as a young budding cinephile recording
movies off TV with one finger hovering over the pause button in order to
cut out the ad breaks. Now we spend a significant portion of our lives
staring at the internet, and thus consuming advertising. The internet
even tracks our browsing habits to more efficiently bombard us with ads
appropriate to our interests. In 2022, practically everyone is aware of
this, and most of us are happy with the trade off of being able to
consume free content by scrolling past an ad.
This makes the premise of Albert Birney and
Kentucker Audley's surreal sci-fi satire
Strawberry Mansion feel naïve and outdated. It's a
critique of capitalism that arrives a couple of decades too late, and
while proffering a reductive "advertising is bad" message, it never
suggests a viable alternative. If you don’t like adverts, would you
prefer to have to pay for the content you consume? Most would answer
"no", save for a few who can afford to say "yes."
The film is set in 2035, when the US government has figured out a way
to tax its citizens' dreams. If you see a helicopter in a dream, for
example, you'll have to pay a small sum to the taxman for the privilege.
Audley takes the lead role of James, a tax auditor whose own recurring
dream sees him stuck in a garish pink room while an overbearing man (Linas Phillips) tempts him with fried chicken and cola. The dream gets under his skin
so much that he can't resist purchasing fried chicken and cola in his
waking hours.
In a similar setup to Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction, Strawberry Mansion sees its tax auditor protagonist
experience a revelation upon being sent to audit an eccentric female
artist. James is sent to the titular home of the elderly Arabella (Penny Fuller), whose eccentricities include forcing James to lick an ice cream cone
before entering her home. Contrary to government regulation, Arabella
has been recording her dreams on VHS tapes, and with over 2,000 tapes to
view, James is in for the long haul. He reluctantly agrees to stay in
Arabella's home, sharing a room with her pet turtle, and sets about
viewing the tapes.
James finds that most of Arabella's dreams feature a younger version of
herself (played by Grace Glowicki), whom James appears to fall
for. Along with the young Arabella's charms, he notices odd glitches
like a haze of static obscuring the logo of a fried chicken franchise.
Arabella reveals that she and her late husband invented the dream
equivalent of an ad-blocker, a helmet (which looks a lot like the one
worn by Jean-Luc Godard in
King Lear) worn while asleep that removes artificially inserted adverts from
your dreams. Stunned by the revelation that ads are being inserted in
dreams, James finds himself making an enemy of Arabella's son Peter (Reed Birney), who happens to be the head of one of the country's top ad
agencies.
The battle between James and Peter plays out in similar fashion to that
between Jeff Bridges and David Warner in Tron, though instead of a computer simulation, James has to find his way
out of his dreams with the aid of Arabella. This makes for a rather
tedious second half of the movie, as Audley and Birney bombard us with
an array of surreal images that never quite seem as inventive as they
should. It's mostly people with the heads of animals – don’t expect
anything along the lines of David Lynch imagery here. It's all
insufferably twee to the degree that you're constantly on edge,
anticipating James and Arabella to break out a ukulele at any
moment.
We're left asking a lot of questions about the wider world in which
Strawberry Mansion takes place. If the government has
figured out a way to tax our dreams, why would anyone be surprised to
find ads are being inserted into our dreams? Did something happen
between 2022 and 2035 to stop everyone being as media savvy as we
currently are today? Had Strawberry Mansion been released
40 years ago it would likely have become a cult item, but today it just
feels like the product of someone having a sudden revelation the rest of
us have been aware of for the past couple of decades.
Strawberry Mansion is in UK
cinemas and on VOD from September 16th.
