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Roman
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A recent viewing of Brea Grant’s enjoyable 12 Hour Shift (2020) had me noodling around the loose family of filmmakers, dating back to the mid 1990s, that appears to have gathered around Grant, Lucky McKee, Angela Bettis, Chris Sivertson … Bettis is a terrific actor, and has provided the force at the centre of various films including May (2002), The Woman (2011), the tele-remake of Carrie (2002) and 12 Hour Shift. Roman marks, to date, her sole stab at directing. Both the script and the leading role belong to McKee – but it’s not a project that shows him off especially well in either department. The film slots into a sub-sub-genre spawned, most likely, by Taxi Driver (1976) – there are echoes of, for instance, Francis von Zerneck’s God’s Lonely Man (1996) and Lodge Kerrigan’s Clean, Shaven (1993). Roman, a lonely man who is an awkward, social misfit, alternates between hallucinations at home and humiliations in the workplace (specifically, the lunchroom). He doesn’t own a TV set, so he draws one on the wall. His vacant thoughts are revealed to us in voice-over. He fantasises (in dreamy superimpositions) about a neighbour in his apartment block, Isis (Kristen Bell). Their eventual meeting inside his bare pad lurches from tentative to awkward to … something much worse. Then it’s time to shunt the dream-track over to Eva (Nectar Rose), whose manic-pixie-flowers-in-hair tendencies may rival Roman’s own maladaption/madness quotient. The story takes place in only a handful of locations, and gets bogged down in that predictable cycle of same-old-spaces typical of much low-budget cinema. There’s a gruesome through-line (I won’t spoil it) to which Bettis discreetly builds – and a plot reversal at the very end which is characteristic of the disquiet that McKee’s own films aim to generate. Roman is an odd little movie, deliberately cut to a rapid rate – Rian Johnson was one of its editors, well before his mainstream successes – and, cinematography-wise, playing with gross contrasts of flared-out white and gloomy darkness (Kevin Ford shot it). An almost non-stop parade of wanting-to-be-weird songs (provided by Jammes aka Jaye Luckett aka Poperratic) launches the soundtrack off on a grating vector. McKee, as performer, does little more than put on a gloomy, haunted, fixed look throughout – a little like Leonardo DiCaprio in the grossly overrated Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). © Adrian Martin 30 August 2023 |
