Remainder
About the past, I can say very little … something fell down from the sky
Directed by Omer Fast
United Kingdom, 2015
One is always at home in one’s past – Vladimir Nabakov, Speak Memory
We all feel the passage of time, but current theories of space and time tell us that past, present, and future are equally real: there is no single time governing the order of events.
This mind-bending idea is at the heart of Remainder, the feature debut of video artist Omer Fast. The film’s dramatic opening in central London shows a man, Tom – played by an impassive but brooding Tom Sturridge, getting “squashed into the pavement” by debris (a drone?) falling through a glass roof. After receiving an £8.5 million settlement for a traumatic brain injury Tom spends the rest of the film attempting to piece together his fragmented memories. He does this by recreating half-remembered scenarios: but are these scenes really from his past? The narrative is based on Tom McCarthy’s cult novel of the same name, a book that none of ReidsonFilm have read so this is a review of the film on its own terms.
That setting may sound straightforward enough, but we are slowly drawn into a tangled web where incidents in the here and now and recollections of past events bleed into each other. We are in a world that is eerie, yet also very familiar. As you would perhaps expect from an artist with a background in video Fast’s production design is beautifully rendered with a muted colour palette – almost monochromatic – that reflects Tom’s isolation from reality. Although set in London, many of the scenes are shot in Berlin. This and the director’s use of liminal spaces combine to give us that Freudian mood of the uncanny: unheimlich.
Liminal space: a between-space or threshold, typically one that can feel familiar yet uncanny or even surreal - in modern life these might include hotels, long corridors or places that have an ‘absence’ about them, such as an empty primary school or shopping centre.
Tom pushes this act of (re-)creation to the extreme. He buys a mansion block and populates it with a cast of actors playing characters from his memories: a piano teacher composing Chopin in his spare time; an elderly cleaning lady; and then tenants whose features he can’t recall, so they wear blank masks.
He is ably assisted here by Naz, a master fixer (or Djinn?) played with a masterful mix of sincerity and irony by Arsher Ali. Confidential police reports, castrated cats, a replica bank, and even a whole new sky (with clouds!): whatever you need, Naz is your man. Eight million quid spreads pretty far in this version of London.
Tom rebuilds and repeats these scenes from his past again and again, striving for what he sees as perfection. His single-mindedness and obsessional need for control speak to the role of the film director, with Naz as producer. Think of the monomaniacal behaviour of Stanley Kubrick, forever in search of the right sound, the right colour, the right smell. And at times cruelly demanding of his actors.
Does Tom have a God complex? Or perhaps he is simply suffering the consequences of a head injury: his emotions are blunted, although interspersed with outbursts of impulsivity and aggression. He lacks empathy for others and is certainly showing signs of perseveration – continuously repeating his actions. Too concrete a reading perhaps?
These repetitive patterns parallel the Hindu concept of time: creation and destruction happening in endless cycles with Shiva, Divine Lord of the Dance, holding the drum that sounds the creation of universe in his right hand, and the fire that will destroy the universe in his left. Sisyphus rolling his boulder up that hill time after time also comes to mind.
The looping, yet elliptical, narrative reaches its climax with Tom’s recollection of a bank robbery taking place at the exclusive Sleets of Holborn (think Nigel Farage’s favourite bank, Coutts). So, of course Naz provides an ex-con turned author to come up with a plan, along with four seemingly probationary robbers to execute it. Practice makes perfect until Tom decides that to achieve his goal the robbery must take place in the actual rather than replica bank … and with real guns.
Of course, we have been here many times before with cinema and memory: Memento, the recent ReidsonFilm award-winner Upstream Color, Mulholland Drive, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York … in fact any film by Charlie Kaufman. Those repeating cycles again. And Remainder is not without its flaws. A small, perhaps unfair, gripe but anyone familiar with health services in the UK might find the portrayal of care following a traumatic brain injury grating; there is also a McGuffin involving a Pulp Fiction suitcase that feels out of place. And in a film where the focus is very much on Tom’s state of mind – this is a cinema of interiority – the sociocultural commentary on urban gentrification and racial tension feels half-baked.
However, these are minor complaints. Remainder is an impressive debut from Omer Fast. Like that other artist turned director, Steve McQueen, he really knows how to represent complex ideas with a visual flair all within the confines of the cinematic frame and ReidsonFilm certainly hopes to see more from him.
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. Marcel Proust
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 74
T - 68
N - 72
S - 70
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Coming next … The Wailing (2016)