In Fabric
Peter Strickland (2018)
The writer-director Peter Strickland’s fourth dramatic feature is fascinating and often very funny. As visually inventive as his earlier work, this one advances the considerable verbal flair of its immediate predecessor, The Duke of Burgundy (2014). In the opening shots, a pair of hands opens a cardboard box. Red nail-varnished fingernails anticipate the box’s contents – a red dress – and introduce a title sequence comprising stills of what will be key images in the film to follow. The montage is gripping, the grip maintained for most of the two hours of In Fabric – a singular horror-comedy whose strapline might be ‘consumerism gone mad’.
Some of those images in the title sequence are disturbing but it ends prosaically enough: the camera shows the text of an article in a local newspaper, heralding the start of the January sales, then moves to the paper’s lonely-hearts ads. This combination introduces fiftyish Sheila Woolchapel (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), whose marriage has recently ended and who’s looking tentatively for another partner. She sets up a date with ‘Adonis’ and goes to a local department store, Dentley & Soper, to buy a dress for the occasion. Sheila, who works in a bank, badly needs to be reassured that she’s still attractive. She’s disconsolate when her teenage son Vince (Jaygann Ayeh) tells her his father already has a new woman. It doesn’t help either that Vince, who lives with Sheila, sees his mother as a hindrance and treats her as a skivvy. He’s meant to be studying for A levels but Vince’s chief interest is his older, dominating girlfriend Gwen (Gwendoline Christie). Sheila leaves Dentley & Soper having purchased the red dress that we saw at the start. That simple statement doesn’t begin to do justice to her shopping experience.
The ladies’ fashions section is presided over by the bizarre Miss Luckmoore (Fatma Mohamed), who offers service with a very discomfiting smile. In spite of her English surname, she’s exotic – though impossible to place. Her dark, lacquered hair, pale face and black costume – echoed in the appearance of her fellow store assistants – have a hint of geisha and a soupçon of nun; the bulky stiffness of her crinoline dress suggests a morbid lady toilet-roll holder. She wears bright red lipstick and nail varnish: it was obviously her taking delivery of the package in the prologue. Her accent sounds vaguely Eastern European. Her ludicrously convoluted turn of phrase transforms sales talk into high-falutin philosophical dicta alternating with ominous flirtation. Sheila is taken with the red dress but she’s not sure – it’s bolder than she’d usually wear: ‘The hesitation in your voice soon to be an echo in the spheres of retail’, says Miss Luckmoore encouragingly. The store’s antiquated pneumatic tubes taking cash and giving change reinforce the implication of her extraordinary formality that In Fabric is set in the past.
The details of Sheila’s home life don’t give quite so definite an impression, except for the chunky telephone and answering machine, whose recorded message is old-fashioned too: Sheila’s voice conscientiously confirms the full number, including area code. The behaviour and language of Vince and Gwen, however, could be present day. Sheila’s home phone number has the non-existent STD code 01632[1]. The name of the town she lives in – Thames-Valley-on-Thames – is technically an invention too yet the film’s geographical setting couldn’t be clearer. We can assume the location is spiritually coterminous with Reading, where Peter Strickland (born in 1973) grew up.
Drawing on Strickland’s own youthful memories of town centre shopping, In Fabric is a nightmarish reverie on the secret life of clothes and a portrayal of consumer culture as something ingrained yet unstable – tending to spoliation. Strickland shows a television commercial for Dentley & Soper, at both the start and the end of its New Year sales period. This has the technical crumminess of adverts for local businesses you used to see at the cinema but the content is much weirder. Jo Thompson’s clever costumes confirm the sense of a story that could just about be taking place in the present but which belongs to the past. Characters’ names complete the effect. The Sheilas, Vinces and Gwens of the world are a dying breed. The film’s focus switches halfway through to a thirtyish, long-engaged couple – Babs (Hayley Squires) and Reg (Leo Bill).
There’s no mention, needless to say, of online shopping but Strickland is clearly illustrating the death throes of the traditional high street. These aren’t, though, a simple matter of a bang or a whimper. Although the department store has an eerie phantom quality, furious appetite thrives beneath – that is, behind the surface civility and literally below the level of ladies’ fashions in Dentley & Soper. (What a difference a D makes: Bentley & Soper would have had a flavour of enduring reliability – Dentley gives the store’s name a used goods, come-down-in-the-world twist.) January sales crowds, stampeding towards bargains as shop doors open, are a familiar sight on television news. Strickland makes use of such images but he’s interested in the other end of the day too. Late on in the film, Babs enters the store and is told by Miss Luckmoore that, on this last day of the sale, they’ll be closing early. Babs is used to getting her own way, stands her grounds and wins the argument. The spat foreshadows a disagreement between two ordinary-looking women (Donna C Williams and Sara Dee) about who was first in a queue at the counter.
Just as important is what goes in the bowels of the place after hours. We watch Miss Luckmoore climb into a dumbwaiter, which descends to the basement. She removes her wig, revealing a head as bald as those of the mannequins that she and her colleagues undress and bathe there. The mannequins aren’t entirely hairless, though. Removal of a pair of briefs from one of them reveals remarkably luxuriant pubic hair. Mr Lundy (Richard Bremmer), the vampiric floorwalker who supervises Miss Luckmoore et al, observes the ritual, which affords him great sexual excitement. It brings colour to his ashen face and a look of profound longing to his blue eyes. As he masturbates, Miss Luckmoore’s lipstick leaks smears of blood.
At the heart of the film is the increasingly menacing red dress that opened proceedings and which has a life of its own. Inside the outfit is a motto, ‘You who wear me will know me’. The dress brings a skin rash and ill fortune to a succession of owners. When Sheila washes the dress, the washing machine goes berserk and injures her arm. When she wears it on a walk, even under a coat, an Alsatian dog attacks it and her, causing a leg wound but no damage to the indestructible dress. Sheila tries to return it to Dentley & Soper but Miss Luckmore refuses, even when Sheila insists she’s not after a refund – she just wants rid of the thing. (On her way out, she encounters Mr Lundy, who, with the same grandiloquence as Miss Luckmoore, invites feedback: ‘Did the experience consolidate your perception of the paradigm of retail’?) It ends up in a charity shop, where it’s purchased by Clipper (Gavin Brocker), as a means to a laugh on his mate Reg’s stag night. Bullied by his prospective father-in-law (Terry Bird) and Clipper to put the dress on, Reg eventually returns home with it, and it takes Babs’s fancy.
The garment, whose unaccountable properties include fitting differently proportioned wearers, is described in the store catalogue as a ‘chiffon, silk and satin ambassadorial function dress’ in a shade of ‘artery red’. It’s modelled in the catalogue by a familiar face – Sidse Babett Knudsen, who played the lead in The Duke of Burgundy. As the model Jill, Knudsen is little more than a photograph here but her role isn’t insignificant. Jill and Sheila both die in road accidents, though only Sheila’s, resulting from her car’s collision with a naked roadside mannequin, occurs on screen. Her death also appears, as does Jill’s, as an article in the Thames-Valley-on-Thames newspaper. In Sheila’s case, the ‘Bank clerk in road tragedy’ has an ambiguous charge. The words suggest a typical headline in a local rag. The nightmare of the accident as staged by Strickland tells an alarmingly different story.
It’s an effective shock but also, I think, a weakness of the film when Sheila suddenly leaves it. Even if he always planned the cursed dress to have more than one owner, the removal of Sheila amounts to an admission by Strickland that he’s unable to take her story further. Still perhaps best known for her Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies (1996), Marianne Jean-Baptiste seems a little too emphatic at the very start but that may be intentional – stressing Sheila’s unremarkableness lulls us into a false sense of security, sharpens the impact of the crazy things that happen to her. Jean-Baptiste soon wins you over: she makes Sheila very likeable, especially in her puzzled but tenaciously normal responses to the disorienting verbal displays of not only the Dentley & Soper staff but also her line managers at the bank (Julian Barratt and Steve Oram). Her tryst with Adonis (Anthony Adjekum) is a fiasco but her next date with Zach (Barry Adamson) marks the start of a short-lived romance. You want things to work out for Sheila. Her fate is horrifying and you miss her when she’s gone. Hayley Squires and Leo Bill are both good (though the eccentric-looking Bill could have done to downplay things even more). Compared with the individuals in Sheila’s world, however, Babs and Reg seem types – overage spoiled princess and boringly ordinary bloke respectively.
The narrative loses some of its momentum along with Sheila. The latter stages lack the sustained, often exciting surprise of the first hour or so: there’s some repetition of the consequences of owning the dress and its antics become more predictable. The fight between the two store customers expands into more general mayhem among the shoppers, including looting of goods. The red dress, which Babs has taken off to try on something else in the dressing rooms (known as the ‘transformation sphere’), wriggles off in the direction of an electric fire. Dentley & Soper goes up in flames. Strickland then inserts a montage, in which each person who’s worn the dress – Jill, Sheila, Reg, Babs – is shown in turn at a sewing machine, working on the red material. All four wear identical grey work clothes; the suggestion of sweatshop labour seems to convey a relatively conventional political message about modern retail. Finally, the camera returns to the rubble of the department store. A fireman walks through and picks up the red dress that alone has survived the inferno. In Fabric‘s ending, although fully coherent with what’s gone before, is something of an anti-climax. But, then, what’s gone before includes so many treats.
Strickland’s surreal critique of the department store extends into other workplaces – Sheila’s bank, the washing machine repair company that employs Reg. Their common features include differently unsettling bosses and absurd, quasi-Kafkaesque house rules. Much of their sinister quality is generated by language – or, in the case of Cottrell (Graham Martin), Reg’s menacingly silent gaffer at Staverton’s Wash, by the lack of it: the only sounds Cottrell makes come when, having sacked Reg, he eats his Staverton’s accreditation. Reg’s transgression was in repairing the washing machine in his own home – after the red dress caused havoc in it. In view of Sheila’s similar trouble, the advent of a character who repairs washing machines might suggest a saviour and Reg does have a reliably hypnotic effect. His technical explanations of the machines’ inner workings put his listeners, their eyes glazed over, in a trance. Reg’s surname is Speaks.
When Sheila’s superiors at Waingel’s bank call her in for a chat, they talk in chummy, vacuous management cliches before pulling the rug from under her. Her handshake isn’t always meaningful enough: perhaps remedial role play (in Tudor costume, if Sheila prefers) is needed? She shouldn’t have waved to the bank manager’s mistress – ‘informal salutation’ of this kind contravenes Waingel’s policy. Her line managers then want to hear about the dreams Sheila’s been having. (The duo go through some of the same routine when Reg, after losing his job, goes to Waingel’s in the vain hope of getting a bank loan.) The opening credits refer to ‘Julian Barratt and Steve Oram as Stash & Clive’. The implication of a double act is apt, and the playing of both actors admirably straight-faced. Barratt has the lion’s share of the lines and makes the most of them. Stash is a triumphant blend of ridiculous and intimidating.
The soundtrack of In Fabric is doubly strong. The intricate, melancholy score by Cavern Of Anti-Matter complements Martin Pavey’s imaginatively disconcerting sound design. Although Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) was more fully indebted to Italian giallo, the coloration here naturally brings the tradition to mind – not least the redness. Starting with the dress and nail varnish, the colour seems to imprint itself on all manner of everyday objects: a laundry basket, a curtain in a passport photo booth, a mop handle. The cinematic influences are evidently numerous. Mark Kermode’s Observer review mentions Tobe Hooper’s I’m Dangerous Tonight (1990), about an Aztec ceremonial cloak that possesses anyone who wears it, and that movie’s more widely influential source material, a 1937 novella of the same name. The Scotsman’s film critic Alistair Harkness interviewed Strickland and writes that:
‘When I half-jokingly toss around references to John Carpenter’s killer car movie Christine, Dario Argento’s witchy ballet wig-out Suspiria and vintage British sitcom Are You Being Served?, for instance, Strickland is nice enough not to dismiss me out of hand before launching into a sincere description of his love of objects in the cinema of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, artist filmmakers the Quay brothers and influential Soviet director Sergei Parajanov. “There’s a power to objects,” he says. “Objects can make you cry, can turn you on, can disgust you and obviously we have very strong reactions to clothing and I wanted to explore that.”’
According to another interview, in Dazed, the original inspiration for In Fabric was a pair of corduroy trousers Strickland bought in a charity shop. When he got the trousers home, he noticed a semen stain on them that started him thinking about the mysterious histories of clothes. Those who’ve seen The Duke of Burgundy will already know Strickland as an unabashed illustrator of kinkiness. Mr Lundy and his team vividly continue that tradition here; the goings-on between Sheila’s son and his girlfriend do the same in a minor key. Sheila puts the red dress in the wash after Gwen, without asking, has tried it on then left it lying in the floor. (Gwendoline Christie captures Gwen’s selfish entitlement very wittily.) Although Sheila finds this behaviour creepy as well as rude and Vince’s loud love-making with Gwen oppressive, she’s not above watching them through the bedroom keyhole for longer than she might.
Strickland contrasts this aspect of coupling with the striking absence of sexual possibility in Sheila’s encounter with Adonis (a splendid misnomer: Anthony Adjekum captures his truculence with fine naturalism). Adonis comes to the Greek restaurant where they meet armed with ‘love vouchers’ whose conditions of use require the lucky couple to share a pudding. The same thing happens at the same venue on her next date, with Zach. The first letter of his name rather suggests that Sheila has now gone through potential soulmates from A to Z but, once the love vouchers business is out of the way, things couldn’t be more different. (Besides, she doesn’t wear the red dress for this date.) Sheila and Zach (appealingly played by Barry Adamson) go on to a night club where they dance together. In a later scene, they make love. These tender, affecting moments stay in your mind. In retrospect, they underline the tragedy of what happens to Sheila, who’s en route to staying the night at Zach’s when her car crashes. They’re a further enrichment of Peter Strickland’s startling, beguiling, exceptionally entertaining film.
4 July 2019
[1] According to a Google search, ‘The area code 01632 is … reserved especially for fictional use in films, TV programmes and books’.