Lodge Kerrigan’s directorial 1993 debut places the viewer into the mind of a schizophrenic through its brilliant use of sound and imagery, creating a very realistic portrayal. After being released from an institution, Peter Winter returns home to search for his daughter, who was put up for adoption by her grandmother after her mother died. His journey is not without diversion, as he becomes a suspect in a series of child murders. Clean, Shaven plays with the audience’s expectations and prejudices toward those with mental illness.
Rather than the slow realization of the loss of a mind, such as HAL in 2001, Winter is already in the midst of schizophrenia, though he is unaware, which is all the more frightening a reminder of the mind’s fragility. He can’t stand his image and covers all mirrors. He thinks his head contains a radio and his fingernail a transmitter. His attempts to stop them lead to a very memorable and graphic scene.
He is a great character because he is the ultimate unreliable narrator. When things are heard on the soundtrack but unseen on screen, how do we know what is real? A focused look at the techniques used to simulate Winter’s state of mind is examined in the video essay A Subjective Assault: Lodge Kerrigan’s “Clean, Shaven” by critic Michael Atkinson.
It’s amazing what Kerrigan was able to accomplish on a $60,000 budget, shooting over two years and edited over another. The scenes blend together well and the film has great pacing, assisted by its length of 75 minutes. He discusses the film with Steven Soderbergh on the commentary track; they became friends at Sundance in 1994. As a filmmaker, Soderbergh is a great interviewer because his understanding of the job allows him to deconstruct the process and ask probing questions that prod Kerrigan to reveal a great deal he might not have thought of on his own.
Article comments