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Great Film overall

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

It opens with pure abstraction, sights, sounds, we think we hear ambient music but maybe it isn't. We are immediately disoriented by the first impression the film has on us. After all, this is what Peter Winter is accustomed to. This is the way he sees the world, just like many movies use technique to appear the way their main characters see the world. Peter is obviously disturbed. But what makes him more disturbed is that he is setting out into a world of which he has long not been part. Clean, Shaven consists of an overtly and insistently mediated reality, Peter at the center of it. We are meant to presume we understand the underlying context of what we see, but Peter's mental illness too often transforms the world into a disorienting barrage of sounds and images.Peter Greene, an always memorable character actor whose filmography is too short, delivers a formidable rare bird of a performance. He is mournfully abnormal. He is possibly dangerous, indeed we're fairly sure. He is clearly enfeebled and debilitated by powerful paranoia fueling such self-destructive and extreme delusions. Which is he? Is he a victim or a psychopath? Both? Greene's stunned, piercing eyes bespeak endless lifetimes of agony. He could go either way at any moment, he lets us know in close to every scene in a mere handful of words in all. He is gravely, distressingly, convincing as someone whose true nature we cannot entirely fathom, much less he himself. Greene provides a perfect equilibrium.The result of Clean, Shaven is an atmospherically immersive experience, a story constructed entirely out of mood. What's even more disorienting is that to name the mood is very difficult. It is shot on grainy, desolate film stock in dilapidated towns, lonely roads, cramped bathrooms, germy outmoded kitchens, and low-rent motel rooms. A reliance on dialogue is something that writer-director Lodge Kerrigan actively avoids, as well as most traces of backstory or explanation. In fact, I'm actively avoiding using the term "schizophrenia" in any of my description because, although most descriptions of this movie do, the movie doesn't seem to directly mention it. It's just felt so deeply that we, again, are meant to presume that it is.Presumption, ironically, seems to be Peter's antagonist, outside of his intensely off-putting behavior. Based on something that we presume he does off-camera early in the film, a detective begins to track him and grows desperate to catch him. But he has no evidence. There is nothing for him, or for us, to go on to be certain of what we gather. But, like us, he finds himself, unexplainably, determined to grasp him. One could say that this detective---who barely if ever speaks, definitely even less than Peter who has maybe ten lines in all---is relatively closer to us, more comfortable, part of the outside world, but then one would presume wrong. This guy has a couple of screws loose; he just keeps a tight lid on it. But that tight lid turns all that suppression, whatever it's of, into aggression, which shoots first and asks questions later in sex and in violence. Actually we can only presume about him asking questions. But at that, that mood, which we might deem insanity itself, is everywhere apparent. The film ends on a deeply haunting note where that insanity seems to transmit, or infect. There is no outside world. In the world of Clean, Shaven, we all have screws loose.The 1990s was a decade notable for the alleged renewal of American independent cinema. It was when an emerging generation of new filmmakers decided to go to the edge and try to break new ground. Many did in their own ways, and the ones who have become the most tremendously influential and hold the most sway over audiences are the ones whose revisionist endeavors plug directly into the pop culture sensibility of their content. Lodge Kerrigan was quite the opposite. But the content of Clean, Shaven, his 1993 debut film, liberates him to explore certain formal possibilities with the medium that are rarely observed in more mainstream cinema. It's unremittingly comprised of a radical visual, and equally aural, style that challenges both Hollywood's creative and narratological concerns. Enraptured by a protagonist trapped in his own oppressive reality, Kerrigan crafts a film viewing experience that is more interested in provocation than it is in pleasure.I don't seem to have left much of any footprints of a hint of basis to desire seeing this movie. But there is positively a great amount of appeal in any film experience that taps into and draws out your most abstract moods and emotions. We're supposed to feel them all, or know them all, have a relationship with all of our capacity for feelings. And what's more, this is a piece that topples the opinion that movies are not capable of depicting internal life.

This is a small indie by Lodge Kerrigan made in 94. Kerrigan's recent film Keane was astonishing (as was Damian Lewis). Like Keane, this film features a genuinely real and captivating performance by an actor playing a schizophrenic. The film's movement is fragmentary, roped together by a soundtrack that reveals the voices we might suppose are echoing within our character's unbound mind. His actions are confusing to him, and make us increasingly reluctant to watch, as watching makes us complicit with what he does, which is bad.The use of sound in this film practically makes it worth watching in its own right, pun intended. In the critic's video essay that accompanies the Criterion release of this film, which is pitched to grad level film students (and that's not a complaint), Michael Atkinson remarks that the director uses "objective" sound, not "subjective" sound. It's true that the sounds that fill the film's soundtrack are given us from the external world, often through the protagonist's car radio and sometimes simply through the ether. But I'd disagree with Atkinson. I don't think this is just use of objective sound to a parallel the film's fragmented and "subject-less" subject and narrative. Yes, it's a different use of sound, but it's a complication of subjective sound, not a departure from it. After all we hear the soundtrack, and therefore we can't but believe that the subject hears them. The use of sound here is interesting, I think, because the protagonist is not hearing them but producing them. We're given the sounds as he hears them, but they echo and resound within his schizophrenic mind, as they are the schizophrenic's world. Voices unattributed, perhaps real, perhaps recollected, but certainly not sounds that anchor the schizophrenic to reality. Rather, sounds that divorce him from the world, catching him as abruptly as an unexpected blow to the head. Short, sharp, shocks that knock about and bring into consciousness commands, put-downs, and other forms of verbal punishment that trouble us for their detachment. We don't know who's saying them. Which means we don't know why they are being said, which means (as Atkinson notes), we don't know what to think of them.Where Atkinson hangs these sounds on a reel of film though, my sense is that they should be hung on memory, which is not a reel of film, is certainly subjective, if not multiply subjective, and is not objective in the slightest for the simple reason that memories can't be. Our schizophrenic protagonist's relation to sound is that he's caught in a compulsive listening, but cannot hear. The coup in Kerrigan's sonic genius, I think, is that in memory is the protagonist's pain, and it's a pain he suffers, often, without making the slightest of sound. But for the one that we hear.

CLEAN, SHAVEN is a dark film detailing the experiences of a paranoid man trying to get custody of his daughter.Peter has recently been released from a mental hospital, and it's pretty obvious early on that he's still not all-there. He tries to function in surroundings that are scary and alien to him, and it is not an easy situation. He wants to be the person/father that he should be, but his mental limitations make that impossible.CLEAN, SHAVEN is a pretty somber experience and isn't recommended for the casual film viewer. I personally didn't find the film to be quite as controversial and "shocking" as many did, but it is a pretty depressing film. One scene in particular may find most in the audience squirming...recommended for those who enjoy subversive/depressing cinema. 8/10

Shows about mental illness can be moving. Loaded with moral ambiguity Clean, Shaven can open your eyes to what might be. Not a show for the weak. Of the many points of view brought to light none can be seen as mainstream. But that's good. What LHK chooses to show is as interesting as what can only be imagined exists in these twisted lives. Definitely motivates me to head north of Maine - in a car - or maybe a boat. Trees, wires, stark grays - just a little heaven.