Cinequest: LEFT (LINKS)

In Left (Links), even before things start to go obviously awry for protagonist Dexter, something is not quite right about his world.  The surfaces are too sterile, the furniture too perfectly arranged, the quiet, tree-lined streets too empty.  As Dexter scurries back and forth between his quiet, pleasant apartment and his quiet, pleasant workplace, he often appears to be the only moving figure in the landscape.  His life is so perfectly compartmentalized that he is spared the effort of having to really live it.

Only Dexter's pet mice stimulate his emotions.  He calls to them from the door as he arrives home every evening, the way one might call to a spouse or child.  Near the beginning, he lovingly assembles a new wheel for the mice and places it tenderly in their cage.  With humans, however, he is at a loss, interacting with them because he is compelled to, not because he wishes to.  Even with his girlfriend Stella he is restrained, more polite than passionate.  After tripping over some of her stuff in the middle of the night when she stays over, he tentatively offers to build a cabinet for her things.  When she accepts, his face is suffused with the same tenderness as his mice inspire.  He has found a way he can relate to her.

Chaos creeps into his ordered world.  The building he works in is being remodeled, and the workers are none too mindful of Dexter's boundaries.  Stella tries to clean the mouse cage and accidentally allows the mice to escape.  Mysterious scratches and dents appear on his car.  He begins to have difficulty distinguishing one person from another.  Is the woman before him Stella, or the new receptionist at work, or a doctor in the psychiatric hospital to which he suddenly finds himself committed?

 

The combined effects of writer-director Froukje Tan's careful camera work and the clean, brilliant colors of locations and props create the most user-friendly dystopia imaginable.  The restrained score by Easy Aloha's melts down into primitive electronic bleeps and bloops as Dexter's world unravels.  Warning of the perils of modern technologically-enhanced life even as it celebrates the strange beauty thereof, the film is a thematic and aesthetic successor to Antonioni's Red Desert.

When Dexter has finally recovered enough to return to work, the remodelling is finished.  Gone are his workbench, his bins of electronic bits and bobs, his oscilloscope.  Instead, he will now occupy a cubicle containing only a computer.  Slick gray surfaces have replaced colorful clutter.  In a world in which the line between work time and down time is often blurred, when our personal and professional lives are increasingly indistinguishable, the lesson is clear.  And Dexter has learned it; the alteration in the appearance of his world reflects the change in his perceptions.

In the final scene, in which he returns to the hospital to reconnect with a fellow patient--another Stella doppelgänger--we see that, in losing a part of himself, he has gained humanity and the ability to genuinely relate to others.  No longer able to maneuver on auto-pilot, he is left with only one thing to do: live.

Left is a film to be watched closely.  Tan is a master of subtlety who rewards an alert audience and refuses to indulge a lazy one.  As with Dexter's world, both the devil and the delight are in the details.