The Carpenters’ Superstar, the spookiest of the MOR duo’s hits, has had an interesting afterlife. It lent its title to Todd Haynes’s famous – some would say notorious – 1987 re-enactment of Karen Carpenter’s decline through the medium of animated Barbie dolls. Now Naqqash Khalid, an innovative English director with a singularly elliptical voice, weaves it through a debut feature that unnerves, provokes and intrigues. The Carpenters look to have more lasting influence than more superficially cool contemporaries.
In Camera, arriving this week to MUBI, follows the travails of Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan), an aspiring British-Asian actor moving about an unforgiving version of contemporary London. He is currently tied into a dumb cop show. He tries out for a toothpaste commercial. He participates in pretentious exercises. When not pounding the pavements, he shares sob stories with his Irish flatmate Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne), an overworked junior doctor, and, later, a new, mysterious cohabitee called Conrad (Amir El-Masry).
It is the sort of scenario that generated freaky weirdness in 1960s Brit flicks. Here, the aesthetic is colder, more resistant, more demanding. Initially, as Conrad invades the home space, it looks as if we may be treading in similar horror-adjacent territories to those mapped by Peter Strickland in such contemporary films as In Fabric and Flux Gourmet. The fresh arrival is a menswear stylist with a go-ahead thrust much at odds with Aden’s reticence. What’s he up to? But, again, the director sits back. Not until the end do we sink into anything like extreme violence. In Camera continues its steady progress with little apparent enthusiasm for the big gesture.
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Khalid is certainly pondering differing levels of racism within the industry. As the protagonist tries on his best fluoride grin when trying out for the toothpaste ad, the auditioner keeps yelling “whiter, whiter!” Later, up for a part as a hostage taker, he is instructed to come up with “an accent”. The country is not specified, but we know what is being implied.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
For the most part, however, In Camera steers away from didacticism. This is a deliberately puzzling, oblique affair that never runs when it can sneak. The wilder surreal outbreaks – mostly touching on Bo’s fraught state – are outnumbered by Pinteresque menace. The word “promising” is hard to avoid. So is the word “frustrating”.
