Strawberry Mansion
**Seen at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.
Someone in the group chat I’m in for Sundance compared “Strawberry Mansion” to a Michel Gondry film, and that’s a very fair stylistic comparison for this film. Unfortunately, writers and directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney cannot keep the surrealism from overpowering any narrative and thematic drive the film has, and that is disappointing, because this film starts off extremely well. If nothing else, it is one of the most wonderfully designed films of the fest, and for that alone, it’s worth checking out.
The film begins in a strawberry pink room, where a man in a suit (Audley himself) is confronted by a bearded man who wants to share some chicken with him. We’re out of that scene rather quickly, and come to see that it was a dream, which the man in the suit- James Preble- has to save on a little USB-looking drive. The year is 2035, and dreams are something to be taxed, because of course they are, and Preble is a dream auditor. He is being sent out to do an audit on an old woman named Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller), who hasn’t paid taxes on her dreams in a number of years. She never updated the equipment she was to save them on, either; she has over 2000 VHS cassettes Preble must look through. When something unfortunate happens during the audit, Arabella’s family comes in, and the situation for Preble, and Arabella’s dreams, becomes precarious.
There are elements here for a social satire along the lines of “Brazil,” with Preble in the Jonathan Pryce role, but there’s not the dramatic weight of Terry Gilliam’s beloved film to carry it as it moves through its vivid flights of fancy in the second half of the film, which includes rat sailors, horned guests, a younger version of Arabella that Preble has seen in her dreams (and is played by Grace Glowicki), and some wonderous stop-motion, and other practical effects. The visuals are matched by the score by Dan Deacon, which has a 1980s synth sound akin to Tangerine Dream to go with the bleached-out cinematography by Tyler Davis. Unfortunately, while the movie delights on a sensory level, thematically and narratively it gets too complicated in its whimsy, leaving us in the lurk too much to be easily recommended for anyone outside of those who appreciate such work viscerally, and do not require narrative cohesion to be entertained.
