Miles Mountjoy, an unemployed English lit graduate (I know how he feels!), goes on the job-hunting rounds, being rejected for a number of reasons, because he has no computer skills, because a female employer mistakenly assumed he's accused her of sleeping her way to the top, because, just as he's about to be accepted, his briefcase is revealed to be an empty prop.
To compound his woes, Miles is given a clearly erroneous parking ticket. The film started with an oddly incongruous scene, in which modern radio babble intrudes over a seemingly Victorian scene, as a matron in her rocking chair, a dour portrait of a patrician behind her back, shoots herself. On a piece of paper beside her is a list of figures and the name 'B. Faber'.
This same Faber is the ticket warden who, Miles thinks, is indiscriminately fining drivers to fulfil his quota. With no success in appealing on a bureaucratic level, Miles decides to confront Faber, but the warden is as icy as the Man with No Name, and despite Miles' many attention-grabbing stunts (including daubing 'I Am A Criminal' in red paint on the warden's windscreen), refuses to talk to him. Getting increasingly obsessed, Miles stages a final showdown with Faber, with surprising, go-getting results.
Miles is a soft, average university graduate who slowly descends into Travis Bickle-like psychosis. Like Travis, on a bourgeois level, he has done everything he's supposed to do - gone to college, Europe etc. - and yet finds all doors closed to him, a man out of his time, skillless, useless. His waffling techniques and spontaneous versatility should be worth something.
The opening, as I suggested, seemed oddly Victorian, timeless, when women crouched under portraits of their husbands, expected to shut up and stay put. This has no narrative basis here, but is thematically linked to Miles, who can find no niche in society. Having a job locks you into a time-based routine, where you become mechanised, fixed - you have a place.
Miles has no fixed place, and so his world becomes increasingly unreal, without coordinates. Time becomes an amorphous concept, he could be living as easily by day or night. Again as in TAXI DRIVER, Miles' increasing drift away from the world of standardised work leaves him drifting on a different plane, and his hallucinatory displacement shapes the film's form, which moves from chripy, indie-style straightforwardness to a twilight zone between dream and reality.
The final showdown, like DRIVER, evokes classic Western mythology to show how far we've come from the anything-goes frontier spirit, and Miles' destructiveness is as ironically beneficial as Travis'. Miles' heightened reality isn't as ambiguous as Travis's though, its dreamlike status confirmed by the increased stylisation and the transition to black and white.
Unemployment is very rarely shown in American cinema, or if it is, it's treated with worthy grimness (eg. THE GRAPES OF WRATH). This is a funny, sympathetic, if slightly self-congratulatory, insight into what happens to bright minds locked out of their perceived birth-right.
To compound his woes, Miles is given a clearly erroneous parking ticket. The film started with an oddly incongruous scene, in which modern radio babble intrudes over a seemingly Victorian scene, as a matron in her rocking chair, a dour portrait of a patrician behind her back, shoots herself. On a piece of paper beside her is a list of figures and the name 'B. Faber'.
This same Faber is the ticket warden who, Miles thinks, is indiscriminately fining drivers to fulfil his quota. With no success in appealing on a bureaucratic level, Miles decides to confront Faber, but the warden is as icy as the Man with No Name, and despite Miles' many attention-grabbing stunts (including daubing 'I Am A Criminal' in red paint on the warden's windscreen), refuses to talk to him. Getting increasingly obsessed, Miles stages a final showdown with Faber, with surprising, go-getting results.
Miles is a soft, average university graduate who slowly descends into Travis Bickle-like psychosis. Like Travis, on a bourgeois level, he has done everything he's supposed to do - gone to college, Europe etc. - and yet finds all doors closed to him, a man out of his time, skillless, useless. His waffling techniques and spontaneous versatility should be worth something.
The opening, as I suggested, seemed oddly Victorian, timeless, when women crouched under portraits of their husbands, expected to shut up and stay put. This has no narrative basis here, but is thematically linked to Miles, who can find no niche in society. Having a job locks you into a time-based routine, where you become mechanised, fixed - you have a place.
Miles has no fixed place, and so his world becomes increasingly unreal, without coordinates. Time becomes an amorphous concept, he could be living as easily by day or night. Again as in TAXI DRIVER, Miles' increasing drift away from the world of standardised work leaves him drifting on a different plane, and his hallucinatory displacement shapes the film's form, which moves from chripy, indie-style straightforwardness to a twilight zone between dream and reality.
The final showdown, like DRIVER, evokes classic Western mythology to show how far we've come from the anything-goes frontier spirit, and Miles' destructiveness is as ironically beneficial as Travis'. Miles' heightened reality isn't as ambiguous as Travis's though, its dreamlike status confirmed by the increased stylisation and the transition to black and white.
Unemployment is very rarely shown in American cinema, or if it is, it's treated with worthy grimness (eg. THE GRAPES OF WRATH). This is a funny, sympathetic, if slightly self-congratulatory, insight into what happens to bright minds locked out of their perceived birth-right.
