INSIDE/OUT Reviewed by Piers Handling
TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 1997
Screenings:
September. 6th, 1997 2:30PM PRESS AND INDUSTRY :
September 7th 7:15PM Cumberland 1 NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE
September 9th 11:15AM
"Rob Tregenza is a true independent. He works outside the normal channels of production,distribution and exhibition to control his work in a way that must be the envy of many filmmakers. But this choice has meant that since his startling debut feature TALKING TO STRANGERS, shown in Toronto in 1988 and selected by Jean-Luc Godard as the film he wanted to discuss in last years Dialogues series, he has only made one other film, THE ARC. Tregenza has managed to gather the resources necessary to make a third film, shot very quickly this winter with little money and lots of good will.
Shot in high contrast black and white, cinemascope, INSIDE/OUT is more a film about imagery and silence than it is about narrative and character. Using the eerie unsettling backdrop of a psychiatric hospital, which mirrors the distrurbing tone of the entire piece, Tregenza places his characters against this semi-wasteland, a place where behaviour is unpredictable, bizzare, outlandish and threatening.
Jean Hammett is a French artist who has been confined to a small psychiatric institution. Monica Phillips played by Godard discovery Berangere Allaux, is transferred to Jean's hospital after a failed attempt to escape from another institution. She grows increasingly obsessed with Jean because in her mind, he represents freedom. A former Jazz great, an Episcopal priest who has seen the darker side of war which has left him scarred, and a church organist make up the other characters, all of whose lives linger on the verge of desparation and madness. They are looking for some key, perhaps a way to "normality" or to the outside world. But Tregenza's troubling film blurs easy distinctions between madness and normality, the inside and the outside world, until we are truely caught in a metaphysical trap.
Minimalist, dark and obsessive, marked by the long takes which are becoming his trademark, INSIDE/OUT is the work of a director who has refused the easy path, and whose films trace a highly personal odyssey through modern America.
Piers Handling
TORONTO Festival review by EDDIE COCKRELL at Nitrateonline.com