House

Every so often a film comes along that is so original and inventive it is difficult to find familiar categories to convey its appeal. House, a wonderfully off-kilter comedy, is such a film. It is a small Canadian movie adapted from a one-man play but in its own way, it shows more wit, ambition and imagination than anything that came out of Hollywood that year (1996). I recently watched the film again and was struck by how well it holds up - and how deserving it is of a wider audience.

HOUSE is a series of come/Gothic vignettes related by a neurotic/psychotic who is fresh out of group therapy and has a dead-end desk job at a septic-tank company. Its Nova Scotian-born star, Daniel MacIvor, won the Chalmers Award, Canada's top drama prize for writing the original play. Making his feature debut, Toronto director Laurie Lynd, who helped adapt the script, does a brilliant job of capturing - and enhancing - MacIvor's galvanic performance.

In adapting a play for the screen, a director usually tries to strip away the theatricality to make it more like a movie. Yet HOUSE, a play within a movie, is more cinematic and more theatrical than the stage show. Just as McIvor tried to break through the fourth wall of the stage, by talking directly to the audience, so do the filmmakers, by literally putting an audience in the picture.

After posting flyers on the main street of a small town, Victor (MacIvor) draws a motley group of 10 spectators to his one-man performance in a church. As he unravels stories of his dysfunctional life, one man responds with nervous laughter, a woman shifts uncomfortably in her seat, another viewers sits strangely enraptured. With unnerving aggression and an acid wit, Victor unleashes the rant of a loser. He asks why "rolling a ball between my fingers" is not considered as creative in group therapy as making lampshades with popsicle sticks. He talks of seeing the saddest man in the world, of discovering that his wife is a dominatrix - and his tales climax with the comic nightmare of him inviting his boss to the house for dinner. (Whenever Victor says "house", his arms fly up in exclamation: "It's not a show," he says. "It's my life. It's my house!") Expanding on the play, the film intersperses Victor's story with sweetly surreal fables, fantasy sequences enacted by the 10 spectators. And, in the end, they are the real house in HOUSE - a surrogate for the small, scattered audience that goes to see Canadian movies. This is one art-house film that deserves better.

While I was visiting Ann Arbor, Michigan I was lucky enough to catch this film on TV. It's a sort of twisted tale, and very hard to describe, but here goes. The entire movie is pretty much one man on stage telling an unpredictabe, crazy story. It takes place in a church and there is a handful of people listining to his tale. As his story progresses, the people in the audience start to see themselves as the characters in his story. My weak description dosen't do the movie justice. Just take my word for it, it is really worth seeing.

MacIvor's award-winning play doesn't quite cut it as a film. The characters presented in the "Humans" section of the published version of "House" are invited to hear Victor's (MacIvor) rant. Although Victor's story remains true to the play, all to often we are dragged out of his engrossing tale to get meaningless and dragged-out reactions from the audience. Who cares what they think? MacIvor is such a wonderful performer that you could leave the camera in front of him and slap a release date on the film canister. The only time the other characters work as a film device is when we follow them on their individual stories as narrated by Victor. Besides this fundamental flaw, the film is beautifully shot and the closing sequence when Victor finds himself outside are magical. I do hope Lynd and MacIvor team up to film his other plays and learn to trust that the one-man show format is enough to create a interesting film.

This film is a little gem. I hadn't heard about it when it was released almost 10 years ago. It's based on a play of the same name about a man who has lost his wife to his boss, and so he has also lost his job, and most significantly, he loses his house. Victor is then compelled to tell his story to strangers. He does this in a very idiosyncratic manner that is completely engrossing. He takes you on tangents and these tangents take you to really unexpected places and by the end, he's circled back to connect all the dots and it's quite stunning. Yet the film goes beyond the stage version and also takes the viewer into the imaginations of each of the characters who has been intrigued enough to attend a performance of the 'play'. And these flights of fancy are also finally connected to the story being told by Victor.

The film is both lyrical and, at times, unsettling. One never knows what will happen from one segment to the next. At times it's told like an allegory but is also very immediately funny. At times, it's got a kind of magic realism to it. This film defies description in some ways, because it surprises and delights in a most unique way. If you want to see something moving and special, rent this film.

brenda b