Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Nina Conti
Starring: Nina Conti, Shenoah Allen
I first saw Nina Conti performing at a late-night cabaret in a literary festival on the Welsh border and was gleefully destabilised by her show; this ostensibly wholesome woman with a rudimentary glove monkey on the end of her arm involuntarily giggling at the foul-mouthed sentiments enunciated by the felt simian. The act predicated upon a mismatch dynamic: sweet Nina and her wall to wall smile vs the Slavonic filth of Monkey, who was half childlike naïf, the rest jaded geriatric. It's a dichotomy inherent to hand puppetry, from Emu attacking Snoop Dogg to the crude humour of Podge and Rodge, with Mr. Punch the exemplar: marionettes with their stuttering precocity are the respectable face of puppetry, while hand puppets are a chaotic yan, textile lords of mischief. Try it - if you have one, put your hand in a puppet or if not just claw your right fingers in the facsimile of a maw, and play. Within moments your hand and what covers it will seem to have a life of its own, as if you've cleaved yourself. It is bizarre. Is it because hands are true instruments of expression, after all we type and write with them, but which also betray us when we lie or are nervous, giving way to ticks and clamminess and gesticulation that subconsciously provide a true barometer of our feelings? Conti's turn channels this strange energy, a delectably creepy uncanny where amongst the jokes about fisting and schizophrenia the audience are increasingly unsure where performer and puppet end, and who/what is truly in control.
Conti's Sunlight (with writing duties shared by co-star Shenoah Allen) is a psychological development of her stage act. Here she plays a woman in a monkey outfit, the plush peltry and trickster persona spread across the whole form. With the title ironic to the film's thematic darkness, the taboo essence of Sunlight is established efficiently when we watch Roy (Allen) attempt to hang himself with his belt from a motel ceiling fan. He wakes up later, understandably disorientated, to discover that he is being driven cross country in his own Winnebago by his saviour - a strange woman in a monkey suit called Jane.
The New Mexico milieu is pure desert noir, with its liminal characters drawn from that form; the criminal motel owner, the bar worker, the drunk mother; a collocation of outsiders with the story duly hinging on existential notions. The plot moves towards Jane setting up a business via Roy visiting his father's grave to dig up an heirloom. But as ever with the road movie, it is not the destination which is imperative but the mileage gathered along the way.
And this journey is characterised by the cruel, often sexualised humour which typifies ventriloquism or character-based comedy: where the mask enables the unsayable to be rudely said. A character remarks that "when she is in that suit she is diabolical," the pointed pejorative implying demonic possession. Monkey tells that Jane's (always in third person remove) stepfather had sex with her cancer-patient mother - "he fucked her when she was radioactive" - and then how Jane herself had sex with said relation: "his radioactive dick turned me nuclear." The carnal implications of puppetry (someone literally puts their hand up a nether region after all) are explicated in Sunlight when Roy and Monkey/Jane embark on a halting sexual relationship, where Monkey tosses Roy off while describing Jane's wet vagina under the suit, and Roy has a go on the aforementioned organ when he fingers Monkey in scenes of awkward sexual intimacy. Yet what is bravura about Conti's direction is that it all seems so plausible. This is a film so lullingly convinced of its own weirdness that a scene wherein a man digs up his father's grave to retrieve a watch while someone in an ape suit stands by seems almost reasonable.
(Writing this I realise that perhaps what also compels about Sunlight is the anxious authenticity implied by the auteur driven premise: how weird must it be for Conti the person to be so interwoven with this abiding extension of her imagination, so associated. I think this a lot about William Roche, a British soap actor who had played the same character for over half a century on British television, but Ken Barlow isn't an animus in the same way Monkey is. You don't have to be familiar with the playful meta of Nina's act to enjoy Sunlight's discrete pleasures, but for the uninitiated a few moments' search on YouTube will not only entertain but add an extra layer of strange to the film.)
The chemistry between Jane and Roy is persuasive and feels natural due to the presumably improvised nature of the dialogue (Sunlight was co-produced by 5th Baron Haden-Guest). You will believe a monkey is real, and so much so that when the mask is removed, and the film reaches a psychological equilibrium, it is as if Jane/Conti is a stranger in their own movie, with abandoned Monkey as the true presence. This disjointed ending is a final uncanny penumbra among the many delectably dark shadows thrown by Sunlight.
Sunlight is in US cinemas from June 6th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
