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Impulse
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The specialty
of British-born director Graham Baker (Omen
III: The Final Conflict [1981], Alien Nation [1988]) is the subtle
exaggeration of disquieting incongruities in the everyday world. The storyline
of Impulse (not to be confused with
Sondra Locke’s fascinating and equally unknown thriller of the same title from 1990) gives him the perfect
opportunity to practice his craft.
One day, for no
apparent reason, ordinary people start acting out of impulse, shedding all forms
of civilised restraint. In most movies this would lead to grand dramatic
gestures, either Utopia – free love for all, universal brotherhood and
sisterhood, the end of wars and social divisions – or Apocalypse, the Pyrrhic
triumph of humanity's most evil, corrupted nature.
But Impulse refuses these options. Neither
divine nor evil, Baker's characters stay close to the banal ground of the
everyday, even after they are liberated to act as they please. Although a
little sexual license flowers in dark doorways around town, the main activity
these ordinary folk impulsively indulge in is the acting-out of their peeved,
spiteful fantasies – the kind of aggression that arises from life's thousand
and one daily, niggling irritations in the social world.
After the
revolution, what happens in Impulse is that a typically harried bank customer is now willing to actually shoot the
people in front of him to get ahead in the teller's queue; or a little old
granny, sick of waiting for the corner traffic light to change, gleefully rams
her car into it.
© Adrian Martin December 1993 / April 2011 |
