A Cloud So High
A man is the sum of his parts, his actions, his life and memories: for former police officer and sometime football coach turned failing indebted real estate agent Gene “Sackler” Starling he has two broken marriages and years lost to the bottle following his ill-judged action which left a teenager dead, exonerated by the subsequent investigation but unable to forgive himself.
Schooner a small town, neither has anyone else forgotten, certainly not his son Paul, returned to the blue skies of California following a spell in the military and at a loose end; attacked by three masked strangers on Hallowe’en night, the girl he was with left in a coma, the police are indifferent, almost blaming him for attracting trouble, judging him as his father’s son, something which Paul is most certainly not.
Written, directed and edited by Christopher Lee Parson, the world premiere of A Cloud So High was hosted by FrightFest at the Glasgow Film Festival, a slow downward spiral told across three years as Paul (True Blood’s Aaron Parilo) escalates from petty theft to stalking and murder, his father Gene (Carnivàle’s John Savage) cursing the “Eastwest Ransacker” who lives under his roof and eats at his table.
Emulating a true crime docudrama, framed by monochrome footage of interviews of those who knew the family or investigated the multiple cases of breaking and entering, two houses a day on opposite sides of the town leading to the name given him by the local papers, the formal structure defuses the drama, talking heads expressing anger in a vacuum, a retrospective of events rather than the tension of an unfolding narrative.
The power of the performances of the two leads undeniable, drowned in endless newspaper headlines which recap events already depicted and irresponsibly detail crime scene details it is in the service of nothing, the focus lost in the parade of characters whose interactions are directly to the camera rather than each other as they recall their experiences of Paul’s ambitious yet aimless one-man crime spree.
The police frustratingly clueless despite multiple sightings in person and on CCTV, interviewed after the screening Parson stated that his intention was to demonstrate that “the most dangerous place in America is the suburbs,” but despite the anguish expressed by those impacted the emotion feels remembered rather than immediate, a reconstruction whose very detachment discourages the audience from engaging, A Cloud So High floating just out of reach.
Glasgow Film Festival concluded on Sunday 13th March
