[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Voices is the sort of movie that will be a staple of film buffs’ collections for years to come, passed between friends like a box of blood-filled donuts. It’s a cheerily macabre curio about a bathtub factory worker named Jerry, played by Ryan Reynolds, whose pets speak to him, question his morality, and ultimately convince him to kill people (or at least, the cat does while the dog disapproves). Jerry is aware, at some level, that his own mental state is to blame for these occurrences, and as the film progresses it proves to be a master balancing act between dark comedy and genuine pathos. We spoke to its director, Marjane Satrapi, who drives this potentially messy story with a sure eye, masterful wit and challenging moral outlook. The Voices is her fourth film, and it proves a rare and wide artistic range.
Discussing what attracted her at first to the screenplay, written by Michael R. Perry, Satrapi elaborated on the visual inventiveness and freedom that such a concept allowed for, in addition to her initial reactions to the characters themselves: “It’s very difficult to give a genre to this movie, because you can say it’s a comedy, and it’s a horror movie, and it’s a drama, and it’s a thriller, all at the same time. It’s cross-genre. Also, I was struck by why I had so much empathy and so much sympathy for a serial killer, because you never like a serial killer. But this guy [Jerry], I really like him because I know he’s not bad, not taken by a compulsion, going out and hunting people…and then I loved the cat [Mr. Whiskers]. This cat with this bad mouth saying all this bad stuff. I loved him. I always loved marginal characters, the characters who aren’t really [fully integrated] into society because […] it’s always more exciting to describe what’s around them, and how they became like that. All of these reasons made [The Voices] very attractive to me, but it was also getting to create the ‘fantastic world of Jerry’, that was not described [in the screenplay]. What was this fantastic world of Jerry? It was like a big playground in which I could just do whatever I wanted.”
I see each shot of each scene like a painting. The composition has to be perfect, the colour has to be perfect, the symmetry has to be perfect.
“Playground” is the perfect word for the world that Satrapi builds in The Voices, through Jerry’s eyes. She uses fluttering butterflies to signify attraction, reanimates decapitated heads in pin-up girl makeup and lighting, and paints a small-town industrial cement-scape in peppy hot pink. “You call it cartoonish, but I think it’s beautiful,” she explains. “I like bright colours very much, and again, it’s this ‘fantastic world of Jerry’. You can describe it as being fantastic, but at the same time you forget [the setting is] a bathtub factory. Bathtubs [evoke] shower gel, and the smell of flowers, so it’s not inappropriate that it would all be pink. If you [made it all] white, for example, then it would be medical…Each colour has a code. So by using pink, it could be seen as this fantastic world but maybe, maybe, in real life it looks like that too.”
Satrapi, of course, is most well-known for penning and directing the graphic novel and film adaptation Persepolis, and an attention to the visually dynamic, and the vibrancy of a single well laid-out frame, shines through in The Voices. Satrapi elaborated on her background in fine arts, and how it influenced her filmmaking: “My background is in painting, I was a painter before doing everything else, so I have a very specific relationship with colours. For example, there are colours that I hate: I hate purple, I hate beige. These are colours that I just don’t like….As a painter, of course you have a palette of colours, and you don’t use all of them. You use the ones you really like. It’s the same when I work [in film]. I can’t say ‘this is just another shot in a sequence’. I just don’t see it like that. I see each shot of each scene like a painting. The composition has to be perfect, the colour has to be perfect, the symmetry has to be perfect. Coming from the classic art world, these are things that are much more important for me…you can see it (not that I want to compare myself with these movie directors) in, for example, the work of Fellini, or Fritz Lang, or Almodovar. All of these people are painters. They have a specific relationship with framing, for example, coming from classic arts. The plasticity of the thing, the look of the thing, is extremely important to me.”
The film’s look very effectively complements its wide array of tonal shifts, from creepy to campy to heartbreaking. Satrapi explained how she found a balance between these tones and themes: “The life of this guy is really sad…this poor child who came from Germany, had a nasty father…until finally he has a job. He tries to be an outstanding member of his community, and everything goes to hell because of an accident. So yes, it’s a very sad story, but at the same time in all sad stories you have some comedy. And how do you balance it? By working, working, working until equilibrium is established. In the script, the murders are described, and you have to show all of them. But I read it, and I thought if I show these three times, it will become gore, and after gore it will become vulgar. If I show it one time, the first time, it’s really gore, but then the second time it becomes funny, and by the third time you really laugh, with just the shot of a knife and then the head in the fridge. So that’s how you make it, [knowing when] you’re going too much in one direction. It’s important to show the background [of Jerry], also. It’s an extremely surrealistic film, but it’s based in an extremely realistic story.”
What was this fantastic world of Jerry? It was like a big playground in which I could just do whatever I wanted.
From German Jerry to homesick Brit Fiona (Gemma Arteron) to the cat with a Scottish brogue, The Voices is something of a transnational film, full of outsiders who seem trapped, stuck, in this middle-of-nowhere American town. “Yes, exactly, they’re stuck there. And you know, they’re human beings, and a psycho can come from any country, any continent, any city. You tend to forget that human beings’ reactions are the same everywhere, and we’re not so different. Therefore, the actors come from all over the world. It’s an American movie but the only American actor that we actually have is Anna Kendrick. Gemma Arteron is English, and Ryan is Canadian, and Jacki Weaver is Australian, and we have lots of German cast members and lots of British cast members…but I think the story speaks to everywhere. If [Jerry] spoke Italian or Spanish it would be the same. You have to admit, though, that you have a good number of serial killers in America. You don’t see as many anywhere else. I don’t know why, but…there’s quite a number of them.”
From these outsiders’ perspectives, the film’s nondescript American setting turns downright creepy. Satrapi clarified: “But you know, a small town is always creepy. It is. A small town is a place in which behind each curtain you have somebody watching you…This is exactly the mentality of a small town, that if by any chance you stick your finger in your nose, the next day everybody knows about it. In the big city, it’s not like that. You can be completely anonymous.”
For a film that could largely be described as horror or black comedy, The Voices features a fair amount of musical sequences. The very last song and dance sequence, in particular, is akin to a sorbet after a large meal: it is cheery, sweet, and easy to swallow, but it’s dissonance from the preceding violence is unsettling in its own right. Satrapi provided an explanation for this scene, why she chose to include it, and the story behind its killer dance moves (pun very much intended).
“I like when I come out of a cinema and I think to myself, ‘What did I just see? What film was that?’ Then I’m really satisfied. If I know what I have seen, it’s like a McDonald’s menu: you know what you get. It’s not really sophisticated. I can’t make the whole film [regarding Jerry] like ‘let’s have empathy for him! Let’s try to understand him!’ …and then at the end, punish him like any other serial killer…If there is a paradise, if it exists, and if we consider that this guy is innocent, he has to finish in paradise with everybody else. Of course it’s challenging towards the morality that we have. But he [directly questions that] in the film, to the shrink, saying ‘If God exists and he’s all-knowing, then he should be okay with me killing all of these people’ …I like after all of this murder and blood to finish on this number – and I enjoyed doing it so much – because I did all the costumes, and even the choreography…It was one of the most enjoyable moments, even if it was extremely tough, because there’s nothing more difficult than making a musical. Still, it was fun to do.”
