I swear it's not as bad as the poster would imply
dirs: Kentucker Audley & Albert Birney
2021
Oddness abounds. But it abounds in a manner that I found oddly enjoyable.
Strawberry Mansion probably was made with a budget somewhat lower than what I spent on chewing gum last week, but I would hazard a guess that if they’d been given a massive budget, the flick would not have worked at all. The fact that it looks cobbled together with found objects and jerry-rigged items from out of hard rubbish entirely adds to the movie’s charm.
I don’t know if it adds thematically, but then the movie’s themes are pretty out there as it is.
The film opens with a nebbish-y guy (Kentucker Audley) trapped in an-all pink kitchen, desperately trying to find something to eat or drink. He’s frantic, starving, dying. A knock at the door – a man appears, bearing the gift of a bucket of Cap’n Kelly Chicken and a bottle of Red Rocket cola. The bearer of such bounties, being Buddy (Linas Phillips), tells the other chap that he’s always here for him, and he’ll never let him down. They eat and drink in a disturbingly orgiastic manner.
The nebbish-y guy wakes up. It was all a dream. He checks some machine, because, in this brave new world set in 2035, people record their dreams, and the government imposes a tax on those dreams.
The chap, dapper with his trimmed moustache and natty hat, drives to a Cap’n Kelly Chicken place, and gets a mess of fried chicken, with Red Rocket soda to wash it all down with.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
James Preble is the man, or at least a man, and it’s not just his job just to tax his own dreams, but to tax the dreams of others on behalf of the government. He drives out to a building, one that looks suspiciously pink, maybe strawberry-coloured, though I’m not sure how much of a mansion it is. He has been tasked, as an oneiric auditor (‘oneiric’ means ‘of dreams’ in Greek, that’s how I know!), to audit the dreams of the woman who lives in the mansion.
She is old school, therefore she records her dreams on VHS tapes. The house is chock full of VHS tapes. He asks her how many, and she says “about two thousand!”
And who is the “she” we refer to? Why, it’s a lovely older lady called Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), who does many things. She paints, she writes, she composes music, she’s a triple threat!
She is all welcoming and charming, and Preble is all “just the fact’s, ma’am.” She offers him food, and even lets him stay over, in order to better facilitate his work.
In order to conduct an audit of all the recorded dreams, Preble has to literally insert the VHS tapes into a machine, and place this cumbersome headset onto his head. It’s clearly made of cardboard and styrofoam, and spraypainted, and there’s these two spots that look like disposable paper cups stuck on, maybe with scotch tape.
Once it’s on his head, Preble gets to (a low-res, monochrome version of him) traipse around in Arabella’s dreams, seeing all the odd stuff that usually appears in people’s dreams, all the weird accumulations within people’s psyches. He sees a young woman (Grace Glowicki) wandering around doing various odd things, but at least she’s smiling.
After a few tapes, something odd (or perhaps “odder” would be more apt): images from Preble’s dreams start appearing in Arabella’s dreams, and the young woman tries to address him directly.
And in his own dreams, the omnipresent Buddy keeps warning him from letting “Bella” in, that she’s only going to hurt him.
If you think that the idea of a government taxing us for the content of our dreams is a dystopian nightmare, how do you feel about the idea of advertising companies being able to drop ads into our dreams?
It seems that Arabella might have had something of a plan, for some reason, in having Preble come out to her mansion and share in her dreams, and it has more to do with wanting to be with Preble, in some strange way, than it does with saving the world from something that someone is doing, that she just so happens to have invented a helmet with glowing doodads from a $2 Shop that can block those intrusive dream ads.
What a shame that just after she explains herself, that she dies, and her evil son (Reed Birney, who just so happens to be one of the director’s dad) comes to put an end to all these shenanigans, to all this tomfoolery.
The rest of the film could be referred to as wacky romantic flights of fancy and completely irrational dream logic if the imminent potential death of the main character at the hand’s of Arabella’s remaining family was a key possibility that doesn’t get resolved for a very long time. Preble and Bella, as the younger version of Arabella is called, have a whole set of adventures that don’t really have anything to do with the threat itself, but are tangentially impacted by stuff happening in the real world, but they also, in an oddly satisfying way, tie into bizarre earlier moments in the movie, including the very strange way the film started. When Preble was trying to gain entry to the mansion at the beginning, Arabella insisted that he lick a strawberry ice cream she is holding in her hand. He balks, but she insists.
As he’s reluctantly taking a lick, the camera goes into extreme close-up, of his tongue connecting with the ice cream, and it goes into super slow motion, freezing completely when the tongue makes contact. And then the title “Strawberry Mansion”, in bright musk pink letters with a 70s style font, appears on the screen.
The blurring of this clunky analog virtual reality with people’s dreams and memories is so effortless, and so mildly confusing that I wouldn’t expend any energy trying to argue about whether it makes any sense. Nothing makes sense in dreams, not logical sense, at least. Yes, this film is about Preble falling in love with a virtual version of Bella, but is she less real than anyone else in this flick? And that love seems to extend to the actual Arabella, somehow, either in the future or the past.
I can’t say that it’s a brilliant flick, because none of these ideas are entirely original, but I can say that it is a charming and enjoyable flick, that I enjoyed despite the fact that none of it makes that much sense. I wasn’t looking for sense, nor was I looking for a serious, well-plotted, complex investigation into what future Elmo Husk-type IT CEO shitbirds are planning for us in the future with neural implants and the monetisation of every aspect of the human experience, and such. I wanted to watch something charming, and odd, and diverting, and this delivered.
It has so many “artisanal”, bespoke, deliberately downgraded or degraded aspects that of course I was going to find it oddly charming, or charmingly odd. The guy at the centre of all this doesn’t try to overwhelm the movie around him, or dominate performance-wise, which is a tempting mistake to make with these young up and comers trying to turn their flicks into calling cards for Hollywood (I’m thinking of the recent flick Cha Cha Real Smooth, as a clear example of this).
But it’s also not like the earlier stuff Taika Waititi became famous for, with his flicks suffused with quirkiness and oddness and awkwardness. Strawberry Mansion isn’t trying to dare you to look away or force you to chuckle through gritted teeth. It tries to win you over, but not too hard. It’s like a cross between a magic trick and a high school musical with heart, and I applaud them for it.
None of that should imply that any of the production implies amateurishness or shambolic incompetence on anyone’s part. However small the budget, every aspect of the set design and how it’s all put together and realised is meticulous and exacting, with everything being a conscious, careful choice. The superlative musical score by Dan Deacon also helps a lot, enhancing the often kooky visuals.
And those visuals can get pretty kooky. There are these dream characters wearing wolf, rat and demon masks, and, I have to say, some of those masks were absolutely terrifying in their level of detail.
I thoroughly enjoyed Strawberry Mansion. It’s very hard to recommend to anyone else, though, unless you’re a mad keen fan of stuff by directors like Michel Gondry (though it’s far closer to Science of Sleep than it is to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
7 times our dreams should only be taxed when we dream cruel things out of 10
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“Why did you bring me here?”
- “Because I wanted someone to share my dreams with.” – isn’t that what we all want? - Strawberry Mansion
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