Flat Is Beautiful (1998)

User Rating:

5.3/10   

Director:

Sadie Benning

Plot Keywords:

Homosexual | Androgyny | Independent Film

Cast

Joaquin de la Puente

Runtime:

50 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White | Color

The dream-like aesthetic and kitschy mise-en-scene of Flat is Beautiful abets a sense of awkward childhood reverie...

Sadie Benning is to New Queer Cinema what Andy Warhol was to Pop Art. Warhol's work traded identity for repetition, while Benning's cinema empties identity, replacing it with fragmented narratives of desire. When Benning acquired a Fisher-Price toy camera - the PXL 2000 - in the early 1990s, she created a body of work that made film-makers envious as the PXL 2000 is now extinct. Flat is Beautiful is comprised of strangely monochromatic images, like Michael Almereyda's pixilated vampire flick Nadja (1995). The images float across the screen like crudely enlarged photocopies. On an aesthetic level, pixelvision irons out the kaleidoscopic image, while on a narrative level, pixelvision conveys an alarming sense of psychological intimacy. Flat is Beautiful charts the anxieties of adolescent Taylor (Sammy Steel) who, like her friends and family, has a cartoonish mask for a face. Taylor is starting to realize she can't be a tomboy forever, it just doesn't gel with menstruation. Taylor's relationship with her absent dad is played out over the phone. Her mother is addicted to televised therapy and says to their gay flat-mate Quiggy, "How am I supposed to deal with my inner child? I have my own child to deal with." Quiggy thinks he'll never get laid, until one day a postman delivers more than just the 'male'. Family interaction is feigned, providing a space for Taylor's Sapphic sexuality to emerge. While this scenario smacks of Freudian slippages, Benning's dream-like aesthetic gives it credence. The kitschy mise-en-scene abets a sense of awkward childhood reverie, overriding psychosexual cliche. It is Taylor's fantasy world of rock stars and Atari computer games that dominates. But it is the one toy that we don't see that really steals the show: the Fisher Price PXL 2000.