Clean, Shaven (1993, Lodge H. Kerrigan) (Patreon)

65/100

Second viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. That was in 1995, just a few months before I launched my website, and Clean, Shaven was thus among the first bunch of films I "reviewed" (hurriedly summarizing my thoughts on every recent commercial release I'd seen). Here's what I wrote:  

Very, very difficult to watch, but worth the struggle. Reviews tended to single out one particularly gruesome scene (which is indeed an ordeal), but I felt anxious and extremely disturbed from beginning to end, and I mean that as a compliment. Peter Greene gives a towering performance as the schizophrenic protagonist, but the film's power lies in its inventive use of sound and its deliberately affectless style of composition and editing. My one complaint—and it's one I rarely voice—is that I think it was a mistake for Kerrigan to graft even a minimal plot onto what should have remained a minimalist character study. Still, a remarkable and harrowing work.

Either I've become desensitized over the past 28 years, or (and this seems quite possible) Clean, Shaven can't achieve its full discomfiting effect via the modest soundbar and small subwoofer that are hooked up to my TV. Apart from the fingernail sequence—still a sickening triumph of no-budget VFX, looking much more realistic than you'd think Kerrigan could possibly have afforded—nothing particularly bothered me this time around...which is not to suggest that nothing impressed me. Few films about mental illness have done a more accomplished job of enveloping viewers in the protagonist's defective headspace, and the means Kerrigan employs are at once sophisticated and simple: shots that glide along power lines, bursts of static mingled with a cacophony of angry voices, angles that conventionally center Peter in the frame while cutting off half of his mother's face in the reverse. You know that maddening buzz and clink and flicker of a fluorescent light struggling and failing to turn on? Don't think we actually experience it in this movie, but it's the prevailing aesthetic all the same. Greene burrows deep into this poor guy, and I kinda wish that I hadn't already seen him in Laws of Gravity (plus The Mask and Pulp Fiction, which were made after Clean, Shaven but released before)—it's the kind of singular, arresting performance that really benefits from an absence of any line separating actor from character*. Even the costume choices are strangely apt, with Peter's checkered dress shirt and tie during the first half an incongruous contrast to his twitchy, impulsive behavior. Highest praise I can offer: This is a film that makes a man spreading mustard onto bread seem somehow vaguely threatening. 

Myself at half my current age was correct, however: Everything here involving a narrative blows. No, that's too harsh. As much as I don't care to see Peter's struggle with his illness take the form of a quest to be reunited with his young daughter (once again, per previous footnote, see also: Keane), the girl Kerrigan cast in that role is so sullenly anti-cute that she almost singlehandedly forestalls sentimentality...though she can't do anything about the insulting convenience of Peter suddenly becoming orders of magnitude more lucid in her presence. (If we're meant to believe that "removing" the "transmitter" from beneath his fingernail has some sort of placebo effect on his schizophrenia, I'm afraid that's a big no sale for me.) And initially, at least, the film seems to be suggesting a kinship between Peter and the detective who's following him, an intriguing variation on what I now think of as the Donald Kaufman cliché. ("On top of that, you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this."**) But that mostly gets dropped after the splinter scene, and I frankly have no idea why Kerrigan decided to have the detective sleep with Nicole's adoptive mother. Another hell-yes-but-then-again: The incredibly disturbing early moment in which we seem to hear (but pointedly do not see) Peter assaulting a little girl who'd bounced a ball off the windshield of his car winds up cheapened by the late reveal that a distinctly little-girl-shaped bag (complete with apparent head and neck) in Peter's trunk is in fact full of old clothes, not her corpse. Like Suture, made around the same time, Clean, Shaven is an unforgettable indie debut that's ultimately just too flawed for me to consider anything like great. Helluva calling card, though, and Kerrigan having made only three features since (including one, Rebecca H., that almost nobody who wasn't at Cannes 2010 has had any opportunity to see—I hated it, myself, but still) is a damn shame. 

* Almost got to experience that with Keane, which is practically a remake of this film. But while I hadn't (and still haven't) seen Damian Lewis in Band of Brothers, I did, for better and worse, witness his Jonesy in Dreamcatcher a year earlier. 

** I quote that line a lot, because it's so accurate that it's perpetually useful.