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The Plastic House (Allison Chhorn, 2019)
🕑 Added 2020-09-27 05:50:14 +0000 UTC
Despite its obvious third-person perspective, this is probably the Currents feature I've seen that comes closest to the intensely personal first-person cinema that we've tended to associate with the avant-garde for many years. With its opening shots depicting what appear to be the locations of the death of each of the filmmaker's parents (although they are actually still alive), The Plastic House moves almost immediately into a quiet, observational mode as we watch the film's subject struggle to renovate a greenhouse that has fallen into disrepair.
The film is therefore centered around a metaphor which is actually a tangible object -- a space, actually -- where work is patiently accomplished and the changes brought about by that labor are gradually registered. In her focus on the rituals of planting, movement, and organization, Chhorn displays considerable formal kinship with Sharon Lockhart, although The Plastic House also interjects private moments that a structuralist like Lockhart would find too revealing.
Near the end of the film, Chhorn introduces footage of her parents, as we see them working in the greenhouse and trying to shore up the vulnerable tarps and scaffolding. Although it's interesting in theory that The Plastic House morphs into a free-floating consideration of the passage of time, it does tend to undermine the rhythms Chhorn has worked so hard to establish. But then, perhaps that's the point. She remediated the space, the elements destroyed it again, and we are all left in the wake.
