Blanca Palmero
Drama
Year 10
INSANITY REVIEW
In this essay, Simeon Bonetti calls the film that is being reviewed by me “Insanity”. Julia Billington played the insane main character. This play displays a lot off different emotions; many of them are scary and make me feel uncomfortable. At first, I thought it was strange, but as it went on I realised that these emotions were intense. The beginning was sinister, with a lot of different lighting, which made the scene eerie and made the main character, as the title implies, insane. She makes butoh-type faces, which is an ancient Japanese theatre; these faces are frightening and confusing as most of the time, you don’t know what is happening to this mad woman.
At the start, the insane female character drags her body across one side of the wall to the other in a bizarre way. She then stops at the joint of the two walls and momentarily reaches up to the video camera that is placed there, then turns her back to it and raises her chest in a deranged manner, almost as if she were possessed by some demon that was trying to propel itself out of her body. She then falls gently to the floor and stands up again, the noise of falling objects is a strange thing and her faces zooms in and out of the camera. The lighting changes around but stays more or less always a white light. At some point in the beginning, the character starts to turn around in circles until she is on the ground, rolling around. The character seems slightly frightened as she is hugging herself, as a consolation. Then, a video camera that is attached to the wall is zoomed in, trying to show that some other people, whom she might be afraid of, are watching her. She then starts making butoh style faces such as the old man, which indicates to us her insanity, as she is unaware of what she is doing. She wrings her hands around and mixed with the butoh faces she makes, she looks crazy; she also looks as if she’s trying to eject herself from her own body as a kind of exorcism. Afterwards there are forwarded shots of her in different bodily positions with strange noises in the background. Then she is seen behind bars for a few moments, and after that there are other people in the scene. The lighting is red and they are making sexual noises, as if they were having sexual intercourse. The other characters also make butoh type faces. They are seen in different positions, such as on their knees and also stomping their feet on the ground as a kind of tribal dance. The main character then looks as if she is in a lot of pain, wriggling on the ground in a possessed manner; this scene could be of her exorcism, her attempt at getting rid of her insanity. After a bit, she falls to the ground, as if defeated and lies still for a few moments. She then resumes her strange movements and raises her hands to her mouth, seeming as if she is drinking water. Then, she makes the outline of a table with her hands on thin air, tries to put down her invisible drinking glass but drops it, making a clattering sound. She looks a bit scared as again, starts making butoh style faces and looks like she is in a type of trance. The red lighting and the strange other characters reappear; the main character is sitting on the floor in the spotlight, with the others running around her. The spotlight that covers her is of normal white light, however, the other people running around her are in red light. This carries on for a while, with the sexual noises in the background. The camera then zooms into her face, in the red lighting and slowly zooms back out. She crawls back into the white light spotlight and then falls back into blackness. She is then seen sitting down, moving her arms about her and also moving her upper body part without moving the bottom part of her body. The camera finally zooms out and blacks out.
