Spurning Tricks - Interview

CHRISTOPHER MUNCH TALKS WITH LODGE KERRIGAN

Lodge Kerrigan's two feature films, Clean, Shaven (1993) and Claire Dolan (1998), are harrowing works because they deal with harrowing lives. The subjects of schizophrenia and prostitution have been addressed elsewhere in film, but perhaps never before have they been given such unblinking scrutiny. When Clean, Shaven was screened in New York at New Directors/New Films seven years ago, a discomfited audience viscerally experienced the terrifying auditory hallucinations that torment the mentally imbalanced protagonist, who may or may not have committed a murder. Likewise, the dissociated sex in which Claire Dolan engages (to satisfy a debt incurred in the care of her ailing mother) is disturbing when it isn't utterly excruciating to watch, as audiences at Cannes discovered in 1998. Like Robert Bresson, Kerrigan strips both dialogue and plot down to their barest essentials, eschewing exposition, and his films cannot be watched without the highest degree of viewer engagement.

Notwithstanding the very limited distribution his work has been given in America, Kerrigan has earned a level of distinction unequaled by all but a handful of his contemporaries. A former student of philosophy at Columbia and filmmaking at New York University, he has received both Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships as well as the Independent Feature Project/West's coveted, if somewhat ridiculously titled, Someone to Watch Award. Meanwhile, Kerrigan forged a fruitful business relationship with one of Europe's last art-film impresarios, the legendary Marin Karmitz, who has produced films by Krzysztof Kieslowski, Abbas Kiarostami, and Claude Chabrol, among others. Though Claire Dolan enjoyed respectable financial success in Europe (via Karmitz's MK2 distribution company), it found no American audience until the Walter Reade Theater presented it this spring as part of Independent Visions, a joint initiative of the Film society of Lincoln Center and the Independent Feature Project, which has led to its gradual release across the country.

Having struggled for the better part of a decade to bring these two rigorously--and in the case of Claire Dolan, almost obsessively--controlled feature films to fruition, and to an international audience, Kerrigan now gravitates toward a simpler and more spontaneous execution, toward letting go and fighting a different kind of battle.

CHRISTOPHER MUNCH: Claire Dolan made me think of Antonioni. Something about its controlled, almost ruthlessly calculated architectural aspects resonated in a way that I hadn't felt since seeing some of his more architectural films, like La Notte and L'Eclisse. The design of the various hotel rooms, for example, seemed to reinforce Claire's dissociation from her clients. It was a fascinating, almost unrecognizable, depiction of New York. Ironically, it made me think of Toronto--the city to which much of New York's film production has fled--yet all of Claire Dolan was shot in New York and New Jersey.

LODGE KERRIGAN: The idea was to try to portray New York as a city of windows, where everyone can look in on each other's lives. Whenever Claire's performing as a prostitute, she's turning tricks in her room and looking out into another hotel or high-rise. At any point, hundreds of people could be watching her as she works: How would that affect her emotionally? How would she have to distance herself?

The decision about how to portray the city really came from the emotional core of Claire and her struggle. Ultimately, the film is about a woman who tries to change her life on her own terms. She's not dependent on anyone else. She's determined at least to attempt to go after what she wants. In order to do that, she has to start decompartmentalizing her life. The men she knows--particularly Elton [Vincent D'Onofrio], a man she picks up in a bar and becomes romantically involved with--can't do that. He has a daughter from a previous relationship, and he doesn't really tell Claire about her.

I'm always reluctant to draw analogies between filmmaking and art, because I think of filmmaking very much more as a craft than as an art. But we worked consciously to use a cooler palette toward the beginning of the film to try to create a sense of emotional distance. We used a lot of reflections to create the idea of image-based sex, image-based commerce, and we used a minimalist style to exclude a large part of the chaos of New York City: We wanted to create a sense of dread and impending doom. And I have to say, I owe a lot to the producer, Ann Ruark, to Teo [Teodoro Maniaci], the cinematographer who shot it, and to Sharon Lomofsky, the production designer. The collaboration between all of us formulated the look, and no doubt if I had worked with different people, the look of the film would have been significantly different.

Anyway, as Claire tries to leave her life behind by fleeing to Newark, she is followed by Cain [Claire's pimp, played by Colm Meaney], who eventually tracks her down. The idea is that she's not really free, that somebody could be watching her, that her pimp is really in control and pulling the strings. In draining the city of its chaos and stripping it of its masses, I thought we would help reinforce the idea of there being a puppetmaster.