First feature film by GreekVasilis Katsoupis, Insidewas also presented as a preview to the EFFS. A film that seems to have been carved for Willem Dafoe in the role of Nemo, burglar of works of art of rich individuals. As a result of an operation that went wrong, he found himself alone, trapped, locked in a penthouse with fortified prison air.
Crystal Trap
We know how the legendary actor has always been able to choose the films in which he appeared. Although also customary for blockbusters, he has incarnated many picturesque roles with popular directors from the independent scene. No doubt thatInsideThis is the perspective. The actor from the theatre world participates here in a work at the crossroads of genres. Art occupies a central place there, since once the alarm has been set off, Nemo will have to demonstrate a boundless creativity in order to survive and try to find an escape. There's nothing wrong with him bearing the name of Jules Verne's character elsewhere. The apartment is apparently waterless and impossible to break the armored door and windows of this luxurious property perched on the top floor of a skyscraper.
It is also the image of the great fortunes isolated from the world where the fireplace is not warm with its grey walls and without adhesion. This is the concentration model with panoptic architecture as Foucault pointed out for prisons. You can see the surrounding skyscrapers and be seen as a furtive shadow that you could see in the distance. Yet no window opens physically to the world. It is behind a thick glass that the exterior is accessible and it is through centralized air conditioning that one breathes. Vital needs are therefore ensured by modernity.
A prisoner's combo, the home automation occupies a central place up to the fridge which advises us on the recipes to follow and orders to validate. The real one. The object even throws the macarena if it is forgotten to leave the door closed. This unusual frigidary will be his only « Contact person » and a whole symbol of isolation with these one-way exchanges. The central control panel, rendered defective during the aborted burglary, will regulate time and seasons, while the thermostat will oscillate between hot and cold. It is therefore confined in a postmodern space-time that the director refines the metaphor of the prison.
Release Art...
To this adds the very context of the burglary: this apartment surrounded by works also enclosed in the same asseptic environment. These paintings and sculptures eventually become simple images for Nemo who sees them daily. On the other hand, the cameras pointing outwards are all virtual windows towards others. In the days and within of the screen, a maid becomes a fantasy until she flirts with the imagination and reason of the thief. Willem Dafoe delivers us a powerful performance, which carries the film to its end. His emaciated and expressive face passes through a palette of opposite emotions peculiar to the prisoner. He gets drunk first, before seriously considering his fate, faced with future shortages.
Deprived of liberty, he screams and screams to call for help. A vain attempt in a perfectly soundproof space. Silence is needed when the alarm is deafening. Nemo recalls paintingThe CreeEdvard Munch. And we could even have fun saying that our protagonist is the sixth version, as a contemporary variation of the subject of the Norwegian painter!
As Fredric Jameson wrote, this painting is «canonical expression of major modernist themes: alienation, anonomy, loneliness, social fragmentation and isolation, an almost programmatic emblem of what has been called the era of anguish». The character of the Cree carries an insoluble contradiction in him, his distress is inaudible; He is condemned to the silence of the medium. He is the only one who can hear this deafening noise that surrounds him, like Nemo and the alarm at the beginning of the film. It is a silent suffering which ends up projecting itself into the prison itself, until to distort the forms, colors and perspectives by the prism of the emotion proper to expressionism.
Like a painter of raw art, Nemo gradually explores his new mental and physical environment and eventually restores the artistic setting whose postmodernity had deprived these works of living room. Located in private space, these works without public should be a categorical ban. It's the legendary« end of art» Hegel. Home art becomes decorative and meaning insignificant. But Nemo draws, paints and writes poems on the walls, while he works with his body and flesh to try to escape to the sky by building a kind of Tower of Babel with the furniture around it.
A ceiling light well seems to be the only escape to this aquarium. The thief passes through all states, from Rodin's thinker, prostrate; To Icarus obsessed with the fire of the sun; to the prophet who leaves verses as wills. It is also that this fragile construction echoes one of Adrian Pica's photographs. She appears in the penthouse. On the latter, passengers wait quietly, agglutinated on a boarding bridge. Above them, the blue of the sky and the world for Nemo.
... Release Being
This complete design of the creation of Nemo shown below enjoys a quasi pictorial graphic composition with different levels. It would seem to be seen behind the imagery of Renaissance paintings and the representation of purgatory, Hell and Paradise. The aesthetic choice slices and is amplified by the phrase of Nemo: «I'm going to heaven on a hill.» He repeats to convince himself. But is determination enough for success?
Notable and visible on the screen, the film was shot chronologically, which allows to appreciate the speed at which the apartment (and the prisoner) deteriorates. The actor even set himself on a natural rhythm: «Since we were shooting in real time, I let myself go.»He's kidding. The transformation had to be tangible:
« I let my hair grow [and] my nails. I was dirty. I didn't wash my hair. I lost a little weight, because I was aware of the evolution of my character. [...] Every day, I felt hard, I was sinking into the character, into his body, into his appearance, into his smell. »
For the purpose of filming, the director called upon an Italian curator Leonardo Bigazzi and all works are real and from private collections. The challenge that these loans had to involve is therefore understandable, when production could not guarantee the state in which the coins would be returned. Faced with the need, some abstract works even act as tools. Nemo ends up overturning a work and trampling it nonchally on its passage, tired of being crossed by its gaze.« I'll free you.» Does he say straight in the eyes to the workA Perfect Dayby Maurizio Cattelan (1999). The act confines itself to heresy and re-appropriation of the author by performance. Not without irony, this photograph represented an ephemeral work that existed only on the evening of the opening where the galerist Massimo De Carlo de Milan had been attached to the wall by adhesive. Like a postmodern crucifixion. We could still have fun deciphering all the many references in the film.
It is by coercion and isolation that Nemo reconnects with himself. Isn't that the etymological meaning to give to the word Inner: «which is within the soul» as underlies its semantic origin in the bookInternational consolation. The idea of dedication passes through the film that manages to pass a trivial act if not proscribed by good morals as a revealing of the tortured but creative soul.
Finally, there is this close-up on Nemo's stools that accumulate in the empty tub in the absence of running water. The captive is torched with the classic sheets of literature acquired at any good bourgeois library. Nemo approaches dementia at times, as eaten by solar fire. One thinks of Artaud and his famous sentence which he wrote in his collectionThe search for fecality(1947) at the end of his abominable stay in Rodez's asylum and then on the ORTF: «Where it smells like shit, it smells like being ».
Like Nemo's attempted escape and repeated failures, blood, flesh, bones, and shit – the whole body of the emerging artist passes through it. The misunderstood poet continues:
« To exist you just have to let yourself go to be, but to live, you have to be someone, to be someone, you have to have a bone, not be afraid to show the bones, and lose the meat while passing. »
Despite some of the film's screen inconsistencies as to the hermetic nature of this gem of fortune – starting with the fact that he didn't have a cell phone – he will be pardoned for these few defects for the compelling needs of the scenario.Insideshould not be taken for an escape game or otherPanic Roomalternative. It is the metaphor of the search for Being that gives it its singularity and all its interest, especially for art lovers. True performance in its own right,Insideis an incarnate and original film, which for a first feature film deserves your attention. Release scheduled on 1andNovember 2023 in France.
« Man has no body distinct from his soul. [...] Energy is eternal delight and proceeds from the body. »
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