Ray Pride

Fifteen-year-old Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) is a girl who wants to run away from the circus; after insulting her mother (Gina McKee), she's troubled by a terrible night's sleep, which becomes an intricate fable about wants and hopes and dreams and drawing and fear. Directed by artist Dave McKean, in collaboration with Neil Gaiman, it's a breathless, brightly colored singularity, with idiosyncratic ideas about pacing and composition that are fearsome at first but blossom into an engaging jape about how surfaces are not what they seem. Shot for a reported $4 million on HD video, with much of the interior world existing only in a farm of hard drives, "Mirrormask" is plainly an illustrators' fancy, with action in corners of frame, drawings that come to life, a relentless dream that contracts and expands with patterns of willful illogic. But it never seems hermetic; instead it's merely quietly weird. Some imagery leans a little too close to the vomiturition of Matthew Barney and while there are neat bits of Borgesian playfulness, the dialogue can veer from dippy to dodgy--"Dreams only get you that far, darling, then you need cash"; "it's just a drawing, it's not called anything--the sheer joy of its making keeps preciousness at bay (there's more Shirin Neshat than Peter Greenaway to the filmmakers' graphomaniac compulsions in this "Alice in Time Bandits" mélange). The video origins flatter young dreamer Leonidis, a full-lipped Italianate beauty with straggle-cut hair, the customary full-blooded pixie boyish girl-genius filmmakers often assert as their alter ego. Sometimes looking 12, or 15, or 21, Helena's obstinacy and prehensile sexuality suggest a female Jean-Pierre Leaud, a beautiful gamin whose heart and head bursts with brushstrokes, pen marks, and strange, quizzical creatures. This is the kind of movie where schools of fish undulate in patterns through open sky to little comment. You'd like to think "Mirrormask" is the kind of movie that can and will warp, shift and change any number of artistic children's lives. I was astonished. Iain Ballamy's music is dear, too. 101m. (Ray Pride)

"Mirrormask" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2005-09-27)

Also by Ray Pride

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There is an instant, an exquisite, tingly fraction of an instant near the beginning of "Reel Paradise"--Steve James' documentary about a month at the end of a year spent running a movie theater at the edge of the world in Taveuni, Fiji by abrasive, larger- and skinnier-than-life onetime film projectionist and prototypical New Yorker, indie film icon John Pierson and his family--that seems to typify what a documentary filmmaker like James does so well
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(2005-09-13)

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