Written, produced and directed by Austin’s Daniel Erickson after a nearly 20-year hiatus from feature filmmaking (his last feature, Scary Movie – not to be confused with the Wayans Bros’ film of the same name – was made in 1991) Eve’s Necklace is destined to be a buzz film anywhere it plays – after all, it’s a hard-edged thriller peopled entirely by mannequins! But the film goes beyond the gimmick and emerges as a clever contribution to the contemporary noir canon, a fact substantiated by its inclusion in San Francisco’s esteemed Noir City Festival earlier this year.
Eva (Veronica Erickson) is the Mexican immigrant wife of an ambitious mattress salesman, enjoying all the accoutrements of a blasé suburban life: wall to wall carpets, wood panelling, mountains of neatly folded laundry, swelling debt and a just-discovered pregnancy that her husband William (voiced by Deadwood’s John Hawkes, who also starred in Erickson’s Scary Movie) intimates he doesn’t want. But in true noir fashion, Eve is a woman with a past – and Ramon is the creepy, bald gangster who wants to bring that past to light.
Ramon’s soft spot for Eva is apparent from the outset, but his violent misanthropy doesn’t spare others who get in his way (think cracked skull and brains migrated to the middle of the street…). Still, Ramon’s not about to grant Eva any favours, considering she left him holding the bag on an unfulfilled contract – a contract that involved pornographic modelling in exchange for immigration papers. When Ramon demands that Eva either return to the biz or buy out her contract for $20K, she turns to her next door neighbour Janis (voiced by Texas actress Cyndi Williams, who appeared in Erickson’s 1987 short film Mr. Pumpkin) for advice. “Maybe we could have a bake sale?” comes the suggestion, providing one of the film’s many moments of necessary levity.
After Eva’s inevitable talk with her cuckolded husband, he grows increasingly despondent and resentful, his masculinity threatened by her past in porn. As she scrambles to raise money, he dreams of fences, echoing the growing emotional divide between them.
Just as William’s dream-fences mirror the real life picket fence he slowly builds throughout the course of the film, the film itself perfectly replicates tropes of both melodrama and noir alike, aided in no small part by the forceful Bernard Hermann score (currently licensed for festivals but which Erickson hopes to license permanently). Replication, imitation, substitution, doubling and role-playing – familiar themes in any genre film but especially fitting in this case, since the mannequins themselves call attention to their artifice. Their blank stares and unchanging facial expression hint at secrets too terrible to tell – but also nicely counteract the highly emotional and claustrophobic camerawork.
“There was always this underlying metaphorical meaning to me that the mannequins kind of represented the superficial, plastic emptiness of the suburban American lifestyle,” says Erickson. “A recurring theme was increasing stress over credit card debt, even though the married couple depicted in the story insists on building their white picket fence that they can’t afford. But putting metaphorical meaning aside, my main objective was to make an effective thriller.”
Erickson’s decision to use mannequins instead of live actors was an afterthought; the film was written several years ago and shelved as the idea of a live cast became financially restrictive. But the casting of a film with mannequins brought its own challenges: “Casting the mannequins was done exclusively on E-Bay,” Erickson explains. “The challenge was to find interesting characters, each with their own unique ‘look.’ Most mannequins have a permanent smile, and I sought out faces with neutral expressions to be able to convey different emotions.”
“I thought it would be an interesting experiment and challenge to shoot the film with the mannequins without making any changes to the script,” he continues. “There were many awkward and difficult scenes, in particular the sex scenes and the fight scenes. It was a deliberate decision on my part to always play it straight, to tell the story seriously and shoot it as if real actors were involved. I wanted this to be a cinematic experiment, to see if it’s possible for people to become emotionally involved in the mannequin characters through the use of traditional storytelling techniques.”
That experiment immediately placed Eve’s Necklace in great company: Arne Mattson’s The Doll (1962), Luis García Berlanga’s Love Doll (1974, with Michel Piccoli at his finest), David Schmoeller’s Tourist Trap (1979), Clark Nikolai’s John Waters-esque Sinfonia Domestica (1985), Steve Hall and Cathee Wilkins’ pornographic Deep Africa (1998, in which E.T. makes his long-awaited screen comeback with a vengeance), not to mention countless films made with G.I. Joe action figures, marionettes and ventriloquist dummies. Even three other films at this year’s Fantasia join the ranks: Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol (2010), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll (2009) and Frédérick Maheux’ Théorie de la religion (2010). There’s something about the otherness of doll films that’s amusing and unsettling at the same time; the latter especially when you consider that dolls in film are often linked to prostitution and voyeurism (even the doll in Weird Science was made into a real girl only so that she could be a sex slave – a macho fantasy that is often forgotten amidst the humour).
All this is to say that doll films are symbolically loaded from the outset – throw in high melodrama and a Hitchcockian mastery of suspense and you’ve got something quite special.
-Kier-La Janisse
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EVE’S NECKLACE plays Saturday July 17th at 9:45pm and Monday July 19th at 3:10pm in the Salle JA De Seve. More information including film description, images and trailer on the film page HERE.
