In Fabric

written & directed by

Peter Strickland, 2019, UK

My approving friend immediately called ‘In Fabric’ “Dario Argento’s ‘Are You Being Served?’.” And afterwards I saw and heard a couple of other reviewers (including the published kind) summarising it in the exact same way. I guess this is evidence that Strickland knew exactly what he was doing and hit his targets.

It’s the kind of thing that ought to be a mess – and another uncertain friend I saw it with thought it tonally all over the place – but its many disparate elements are threaded with the same rigid intent as Strickland’s previous films. It’s a horror-comedy for those amused right from the start by recognising the dummy hand falling into frame in the same manner as ‘Tombs of the Blind Dead’. It’s pastiche, parody, homage, capitalist satire, black comedy and absurdism and softcore porn with mannequins, all thrown into the washing machine and spun until it explodes.

Strickland’s previous films have been direct and serious affairs, not that they lacked black humour, but ‘In Fabric’ wears its deadpan more clearly. It’s signalled by Fatma Mohmed’s appearance as the saleswoman in Soper & Soper superstore, and even as Mohmed gives the most mannered of performances, precisely uttering sales-speak with hilarious pretensions to Shakespearean poignancy, Marianne Jean-Baptiste counters with a performance of down-to-earth naturalism that’s quintessentially English. It’s satirical affectation in one character and no-nonsense in the other. They shouldn’t work together in the same scene, but in this weird quasi-Seventies otherworld of killer dresses and sinister mannequins versus the humdrum of ordinary dull British lives, it does. In fact, the killer dress is presented as the least absurdist element, being genuinely sinister and dreamy by turns.

The domestic drama comes from a mother having to deal with her brazen son’s sex life, or the dullness of a washing machine repairman’s rote acceptance of marriage even as the killer dress perhaps unlocks unacknowledged kinks. There’s a particular English charmlessness evoked in the son’s dreary sex-obsession and hapless Clive’s (Leo Bill) monologues on washing machines, in Sheila’s (Jean-Baptiste) Tinder dates and Clive’s stag night. The horror and glamour come from the sinister and seemingly hypnotic hold the coven of otherworldly superstore staff have over their customers, seemingly harassing them with haunted dresses from time to time. The camp blends with the tawdry. On one hand, the film takes time with scenes of the odd bank manager couple in interviews where they take notes on dreams, and on the other there’s the Soper & Soper manager looming about like Nosferatu. Here is a film whose goriest moment comes from a rampaging washing machine. It’s this conflict of the humdrum and the bizarre that keeps it curious and unpredictable.

It is gelled together by a playfulness and surrealism that directs it right through an abrupt narrative left-turn that is jarring at first, but the tone is consistent making realignment quick. It then reminds a little of Hammer and Amicus anthologies: the continued homages are ripe and amusing but the film maintains its own agenda. One can only anticipate such a film where Ari Aster feels freed by genre instead of beholden to it. ‘In Fabric’ offers fetishism and kitsch horror in a decidedly amused English manner, going its own wilful way and never quite feeling the need to explain its mysteries. Strickland has always known the power of fetishizing the visual and of course that means his films are visual feasts – without underestimating the diligent attention to the audio palette. ‘In Fabric’s veneer is always beautiful, even in downbeat English homes. As Walter Chaw says,

"It understands that element of giallo that equates surface glamour, a certain luxurious hedonism, with various forms of infernal consumption."

Here, consumerism is malignant and ridiculous, resorting to hypnotism and pretentious, nonsensical slogans. And beneath it all, there seems to be a sweatshop…

Its themes of female power and identity flow fluidly from Strickland’s previous films. Here, men are mostly two-dimensional and subservient to female power (even a laddy dad is beholden to his bratty daughter): pathetic sitcom sad-sacks. ‘In Fabric’ is mostly interested in female identity: even Clive, the chief male protagonist, is notably uninteresting and lacks self-awareness. But as dominantly complex as they are, the women are still in pursuit of the right visual cue to appeal to men – but in this case, it’s a vampiric dress.

Of course, it won’t be for everyone, but Strickland has again produced a minor genre classic after ‘Berberian Sound System’. ‘In Fabric’ is different, but again Strickland has found less obvious corners of the genre to original, baffling and beguiling effect.

Seconds

John Frankenheimer, 1966, USA

As a kid, John Frankenheimer’s ‘Seconds’ always gave me serious chills. Not only did this come from the grand guignol of the ending, but also from the idea of failing at life, of not quite being in control, of not quite knowing the tricks of assimilation and survival that others seem to possess so effortlessly. It’s based on mid-life crisis and, as Kim Newman says, on a wartime generation that felt they had missed out on all the fun the youth culture were just about to enjoy. As a kid, I venture that this was unnerving me as it tapped into the suspicion that life would not be the constantly upward curve I was promised. The idea of wanting to do your life over again, of wanting a second chance, of being an outsider not quite fitting in, are not likely to go out of vogue. 

It’s the kind of scenario you might find in ‘The Twilight Zone’: Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is a rigidly unhappy and unremarkable soul when he receives an odd offer from an old friend - one he presumed dead - to be “re-born”, of starting life over. It’s an offer of a second chance, to be what he never was but wanted to be. To this end, the mysterious company who orchestrates this seems quite accommodating – after they have snared him staging him with a false rape, that is. He is reborn as Rock Hudson in an idyllic Californian location. The trouble is: once an unhappy soul, always an unhappy soul.

Based on David Ely’s novel and populated by a cast of faces that would become familiar but weren’t so much at the time of casting – it is very well cast and notably Frankenheimer went for a lot of previously actors black-listed in the McCarthy era – ‘Seconds’ was never popular and greatly derided. As Brian Eggert says, “Frankenheimer himself noted how the film “went from failure to classic without ever being a success.’” There’s a truth and poeticism when Landon Palmer calls ‘Seconds’ the loneliest films of the 1960s. 

With James Wong Howe’s crisp black and white cinematography, Saul Bass’s disturbing credits sequence, the distortions by fish-eye lenses, a seasoning of psychedelic sensibility and undertones of body-horror, there is something always off-kilter in this world. Even the early scenes of Hamilton’s humdrum life alternate from claustrophobic close-ups and agoraphobic wide-shots, creating unease immediately. Not only the accentuated camera techniques but the bedrock of plastic surgery, identity theft and over-reaching corporations were ahead of the times, as Edward Tenner notes; and perhaps its seemingly contemporary backdrop fooled people and contributed to the backlash. Maybe if it had looked more like ‘Fantastic Voyage’, it would have been more obviously a genre piece and audiences may not have felt so threatened, have recognised such a clear attack on their culture.

It’s a world of the mid-life crisis, where post-House of Un-American Activities Committee paranoia is paramount and the film attacks commercialism, bourgeois privilege, arty pretensions and free-love hedonism equally, seeing in it all a phoniness and tapping into our fear that our whole life is performance and our surroundings staged for us, that everyone else in on it. As Eggert notes, ‘Seconds’ offers as a solution neither conformity or escapism – but perhaps “escapism” is the wrong word and hedonism is more appropriate. And yet, rather than a criticism, it seems more a cautionary tale and a warning that happiness lays not within what you are told by corporations and social movements.

Will Greer gives a sublimely genial folksy old man performance as the apparent owner of this somewhat bizarre and mysterious firm which is both sinister and weirdly empathic (hey, they seem to go out of their way to upgrade your second life). Rock Hudson cracking up is the attention-grabber, but John Randolph’s sad-sack performance is equally haunting. This is a far cry from the action inclinations of mainstream genre fare. Indeed, the science isn’t credible at all, but that’s not the point: this is the kind of science fiction whose vigorously bleak attitude shows that the phenomenon of progress will always be susceptible to human weaknesses. With a greatly disturbing finale to top off this haunted tale of a lifetime of dissatisfaction, ‘Seconds’ is uniquely disturbing.