(Canada, 79 min.)
Written and directed by Daniel Cockburn
Starring: Tracy Wright, R.D. Reid, Anand Rajaram, Scott
Anderson, Nadia Litz.
If action, explosions, naughty bits, and other facets of
mindless summer entertainment are a movie-must, then Daniel Cockburn’s You Are Here probably isn’t the film for
you. If, however, the endless stream of sequels and re-dos leave you thirsty
for substance, then You Are Here provides
more than enough debatable mumbo-jumbo to stop the drought. You Are Here, the first feature film by
video artist Daniel Cockburn, is a true thinking-person’s film.
The whole of You Are
Here might feel like a preamble itself, for one never quite knows how to
get a deal for the characters, story, and setting. The film is a constant game
of sense making as it introduces a variety of seemingly unrelated storylines
and lets them unspool in all sorts of directions. A common man named Alan
encounters a conundrum of being, identity, existence, and everything else in
between as Cockburn presents the character as an everyman through a frenetic
editing job that allows various actors to inhabit the role for mere frames of
screentime.
Similarly confounding, yet entertaining, is a quirky look
into the daily work of a quartet of office employees. They’re not so much like
the drones of Dunder Mifflin, as the workers have the eccentric task of
tracking their agents as they move across the busy streets of Toronto. Ill
prepared for random acts of chance in their ordered job, the tracking agents
tense as they put two of their field agents (Nadia Litz and Alec Stockwell) on
a collision course of determinism.
Some of the Toronto stories don’t work as well as the others
do. For example, the scenario with the tracking agents and field agents appears
too fleetingly in the early section of You
Are Here and returns only at the very end. The brief scenes are intriguing
and darkly humorous, but they’re too abbreviated to be fully satisfying. You Are Here, at a scant hour and twenty
minutes, might have opened more minds my expanding some of the stories and
granting the film even more of its eclectic elasticity.
Similarly, an odd interlude with an experimenter (Anand
Rajaram) who has trapped himself in a solitary room modeled on the human mind
seems like metaphysics for its own sake. It’s an odd, random scene, although
the succeeding lecture feels even more out of place. How to decode You Are Here, or why to bother
deciphering the seemingly entropic mass of scrambled eggs, might seeming
pointless by the end of the half hour mark.
It’s only then that Cockburn throws the viewer the first
clue. The hook of You Are Here is a
lonely figure who wanders the city collecting discarded items of refuse. She’s
an archivist (played by the late Tracy Wright), whose discoveries unearth far
more than their mundane appearances suggest. The archivist contains a roster of
found footage that appears throughout the meta-filmic journey. For example, she
watches the lecturer drone on about the red dot before You Are Here skips setting and, presumably, tense, as the lecturer
appears in a contemporary (re: high) resolution, capturing his video footage in
a dramatic sequence with kids. While watching the archivist watch the lecture,
it becomes clear that she has been with the audience all along. It might not be
clear when the archivist appears almost halfway into the film, but this odd
figure presents the audience’s window into Cockburn’s strange world.
The archivist is the surrogate, the one making sense of all
the pieces of the puzzle that have been stored and sorted. Looking at the
things, turning them over, and returning to them at different times afford the
archivist more perspective on the seemingly random things in her trove. It
helps that the archivist’s quirkiness and inquisitiveness is made entirely
accessible by Wright. You Are Here
fittingly marks the actress’s final release, although Wright’s swan song was
her final—and arguably finest—performance in Bruce McDonald’s Trigger. The archivist’s odd and
academic soul-searching opens a door to You
Are Here’s cerebral meditating that had previously been left ajar. The
archivist’s thoughtful relationship with man-made objects bears a lively resemblance
to Cockburn’s playful earlier work on one’s way of making sense of one’s self
in relation to the technology structures—or binds—one’s life. The archivist’s
perspectives appear mostly in relation to, or are framed by, media; but she
only finds clarity when she bumps into a fellow human and gains a second
opinion.
A wealth of ideas collide in this metaphysical and
stylistically innovative odyssey through mankind’s perception of place, space,
and time. You Are Here plays like the
cracked out lovechild of Charlie Kaufman and Miranda July, but that’s hardly a
bad thing since firstborns rarely have such an intriguing fusion of form and
content. It’s arty, dense, and full of ideas that don’t seem tangible in the
present tense. You Are Here makes
little sense until the very instance that it’s over, or perhaps only in the
tense that follows in the post-screening discussion.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
You Are Here screens in Ottawa at SAW Video on Friday, July 19.
Daniel Cockburn will
be on hand to discuss the film and present a lecture before the film.
(So be ready to debate the night away!)
(So be ready to debate the night away!)