Clean Shaven
by Lodge Kerrigan
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Actor: Alice Levitt, Jennifer MacDonald, Megan Owen, Molly Castelloe, Peter GreeneDirector: Lodge Kerrigan
Producer: J. Dixon Byrne
Cinematographer: Teodoro Maniaci
Producer: Lodge Kerrigan
Writer: Lodge Kerrigan
Editor: Jay Rabinowitz
Producer: Melissa Painter
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 79 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-01-04
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Fox Lorber
DVD Reviews of Clean Shaven
DVD Review: Homebrewer
Summary: 5 Stars
Peter Winter (Peter Greene) is a tormented schizophrenic man who is let out of a hospital despite suffering from extreme symptoms of nearly continuous auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and a highly fragmented, discontinuous sense of reality. His one steady goal is to find his young daughter, Nicole (Jennifer MacDonald), who has begun a new life as an adoptee, following the murder of her mother. Peter first visits his own mother, a taciturn, emotionally withholding woman who is not at all pleased to see him. Later he discovers his daughter's whereabouts, when her adoptive mother brings Nicole to visit her grandmother (who is as chilly toward Nicole as she is toward Peter). Meanwhile, a police detective (Robert Albert), searching for a serial child killer, has concluded that Peter is his man. A fateful ending is set up when the detective encounters Peter with Nicole at an isolated beach.
There are serious flaws in this film: the screenplay is not well wrought and is too full of ambiguities, especially the entire serial child killing subplot. This is highly distracting. The acting is second rate, except for Greene's and MacDonald's performances. The film's strength lies in Kerrigan's insightful deployment of sound, setting and other effects to create the clinical realism of Peter's schizophrenic experience. Peter's intense, perpetual fear is palpable. Much of the film is shot in his car, where he has placed masking tape over the mirror, and newspaper over several windows, to fortify his privacy. The effect is an impacted atmosphere of paranoid insulation. Peter's hallucinated auditory experience - garbled voices, static and other noise, unaccompanied by any visual representations - is clinically valid. The voices and noise haunt him steadily. He tells Nicole he has had a radio device implanted in his head, with a transmitter in a fingernail. Earlier we had been exposed to his violent efforts to rid himself of these devices using scissors or a knife to gouge them out - forms of delusion-driven self-mutilation that are uncommon but not rare in persons suffering the throes of severe acute psychotic episodes. The use of tight close up camera angles - viewing Peter from just behind his back or in profile in his car - heighten the sense of claustrophobia, the extreme narrowing of Peter's psychotic world. The setting - Miscou Island, in New Brunswick - adds further accents of wildness and isolation to the overall tone of the film.
It can be argued that the detective's pursuit of Peter adds yet another source of paranoid fever to the film, though for me this conceit does not ring true. The fact that someone really is after Peter detracts from the power of his delusions. Other than this, Kerrigan can be congratulated for steering clear of the false visuals (realistically visualized imaginary friends and enemies) and other clinically implausible effects that Ron Howard used more recently in A Beautiful Mind. Anyone - professional or lay viewer - might rightly wonder how Peter could be discharged from the hospital in such poor psychiatric condition. Of course that happens every day in most contemporary short stay hospital settings, because involuntary treatment laws in most states prohibit keeping patients against their will except in the most extreme circumstances of immediate potential for violence. But we are given the impression at the start of this film that Peter had been incarcerated in a more traditional mental hospital, the sort in which people stay for long periods before discharge, until they appear relatively free of symptoms, sometimes longer. Of course these large old facilities are typically short staffed, keen clinical observation of patients may be scarce, and patients not uncommonly can muster a façade of normality to win their freedom.
The depiction of Peter's mother is also troublesome. Her grim withholding of affection for Peter and Nicole resurrects the spectra of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' - a psycho dynamic fiction popular the 1950s and 60s that accused parents, especially mothers, of causing schizophrenia through self serving, unaffectionate regard for their children. This myth was laid to rest long ago, and it is a black mark against this film to see such a notion resurrected. It does not dispel the power of this negative maternal portrayal when, from a distance, we see the mother crying as she hangs one of her son's shirts on a clothesline near the end.
Description of Clean Shaven
A story of a schizophrenic man's desperate search for his young daughter. Scene Access, Interactive Menus, Filmographies, Original Theatrical TrailerAmidst a glut of more conventional independent films in the mid-1990s, Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven signaled the arrival of a gifted filmmaker with a singular vision. A controversial sensation on the film festival circuit when released in 1994, this riveting first feature (filmed over a two-year period on a meager budget of $60,000) is perhaps the first film to authentically convey the subjective experience of schizophrenia. This all-too-common mental illness essentially serves as a substitute for plot; instead of telling a conventional story of a murder investigation, Kerrigan leaves crucial details ambiguous as he focuses on the tormented existence of a young man named Peter (played by Peter Greene in a brave debut performance) who may or may not have brutally killed a young girl in one of the film's early scenes. His world--or rather, the world as perceived by his dysfunctional brain--is metaphorically compared to the random tuning of a radio, as schizophrenia prevents Peter from forming a cohesive reality out of the sights and sounds that constantly invade his consciousness. To express this fractured perception in cinematic terms, Kerrigan uses a truly extraordinary soundtrack--worthy of comparison to David Lynch's Eraserhead--that's frequently divorced from the visuals, emphasizing the disorienting symptoms of Peter's illness. The effect is both fascinating and deeply disturbing, especially in a notorious scene (definitely not for the squeamish) in which Peter removes one of his fingernails for reasons best left for viewers to discover. It's one of the creepiest, most unsettling moments in the history of American independent cinema, but it's also one of the things that makes Clean, Shaven a timeless and sensitively compassionate study of a condition that's mysterious and frequently misunderstood. A full decade later, Kerrigan would return to the subject of mental illness with his critically acclaimed film Keane, and David Cronenberg's Spider covers similar territory with equally unsettling results. --Jeff Shannon
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