Strawberry Mansion
Strawberry Mansion is a whimsically moving art piece — a relatively low-budget indie sci-fi film that delivers a wholesome alternative to the high-budget CGI fantasies of the day. And its anti-capitalist, anti-commercial message is perhaps the exact opposite of what the multi-billion-dollar superhero sagas of the past decade have come to represent.
This film opens in a Pepto-Bismol-pink kitchen in which main character James Preble (played by co-director Kentucker Audley) indulges in a bucket of Cap’n Kelly fried chicken and a two liter of Red Rocket cola brought to him by an unsettling mustachioed man (Linas Phillips). It was all a dream — a bizarre opening that makes viewers work to catch up with what kind of reality is on the screen.
The year is 2035 and Preble is a responsible, solitary tax auditor. But not just any kind of tax auditor: the kind who — in a future dystopia — audits the recorded dreams of citizens to tax them on the content therein. And Preble is here today to audit a backlog of the unpaid, taxable dreams of the elderly, eccentric artist Arabella Isadora (played by Penny Fuller in her modern-day iteration, and Grace Glowicki in her dreams from decades ago).
However, this job doesn’t look like his usual one-day task. Instead of the digital “airstick” we see Preble use at the beginning of the film to upload his own taxable dream content, Arabella has cached away in her grand, pink mansion over 2,000 VHS tapes of dreams for Prebel to view and audit one by one. You can’t help but to pity them both: Arabella with her octogenarian naivete, getting flossed by the government simply for the images conjured up in her dreams, and Preble for his sad, solitary existence full of monotonous routine.
Audley and Albery Birney impressively assert a great deal of control over the film as they direct, edit, and — in Audley’s case — star in this fantastical work that spends the majority of its runtime playing with moviegoers’ (and Preble’s) sense of reality as it devotes increasingly more screen time depicting cartoonish dream spaces. Once the viewer realizes that she must surrender her urge to understand time or the plot as linear, she is then able to embrace the film for its beauty, its quirkiness, and its message, which is, Don’t let The Man make you into a vessel whose sole purpose is to purchase and consume commercial products.
Dan Deacon’s minimalist, ambient electronic score helps provide cues for the tone and content of each scene, which, like recounting a dream to a friend the morning after, sometimes makes no logical sense and will still have one asking such things as, “Why is her waiter a polite frog?” And, “Why is that blue demon putting so much salt on his ground beef?”
Falling somewhere between the filmographies of David Lynch and Michel Gondry in its bizarre liminal space and nonlinear plot, Strawberry Mansion is uncanny, quirky, funny, and visually stunning. It truly deserves a space on this spectrum with those surrealist greats, offering something different enough to be seemingly an homage, yet also an evolution from those influences. Strawberry Mansion is an exercise in suspension of disbelief among some pretty tried-and-true themes. In the traditions of such bureaucratic critiques as Brazil and Bartleby, this film wields that torch into 2022 with aplomb and intelligence.
Grade: A. Not rated. Available on Blu-ray and DVD, and to rent via Amazon, iTunes, and other streaming services.
(Photo: Music Box Films)
