Strawberry Mansion (2021)
Directed by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney
I rarely dream. To compensate, I’m an excessive (also see: depressed) daydreamer. But when it comes to your standard issue muscle-paralyzing, REM-cycle visions, they’re infrequent and mostly unwelcome. The dreams I do have are often about unresolved regrets, slight modulations of past events, or confrontations with clinical truths. Or something involving zombies, I don’t know. The dead rise and I’m engulfed in the simulation swarm. They’re nightmares and I rarely get to be the hero of my own fantasies.
Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s Strawberry Mansion is an interesting piece of science-fiction, a blend of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and The Pale King along with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Alex Cox’ Repo Man. It’s not as good as those totems, not by any stretch, but the ideas and textures here conjure those comparisons. James Preble (Audley) is a special kind of taxman, and is tasked with auditing Bella (Penny Fuller). In this hellscape of a future, dreams are taxable concepts, with major corporations transmitting advertisements into our unconscious minds and the government subsequently taxing them. Bella has hundreds of her dreams recorded on videocassettes and Preble, in his mild-mannered way, combs through them. He ends up falling in love with Bella’s younger dream self (Grace Glowicki), hoisting Preble from the drudgery of his day-in-day-out and into something meaningful. I have bell hooks on the mind and can’t help but reflect on a quote, “The soul thrives on ephemeral fantasies.” Audley and Birney’s film captures that sentiment in Preble’s journey.
Admittedly, Strawberry Mansion, much like someone else recounting his or her dreams, gradually becomes grating. There are some lovely visual touches, but certain flourishes succeed in their discomfort to a detrimental degree. Audley’s channeling his best Harry Dean Stanton impression here but the self-described mild-mannered Preble threads a little too closely to dull, which is especially disappointing given Audley’s previous credits (Sun Don’t Shine and Christmas, Again are some of my favorites of the past decade). But I admire the sentiment here, the prevailing sense of hope that exists in a world where even our dreams are colonized by private corporations and government. Indeed, the soul thrives on ephemeral fantasies and sometimes that’s all we have.