By Michael Colford
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Daniel Cockburn
Starring: Anand Rajaram | Nadia Capone | Nadia Litz | R.D. Reid | Tracy Wright
Country: canada
Year: 2010
Running time: 79
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1288411/reference
Michael says: “I was reading a negative review of TRIGGER, Bruce McDonald’s spiritual sequel to HARD CORE LOGO, starring Molly Parker and Tracy Wright, when a line caught my eye. Paraphrased, it something to the effect of while TRIGGER was Tracy Wright’s final film performance before her tragic and untimely death, another, much overlooked film released the same year was a more fitting role to serve as her film farewell. Well, having seen all of Tracy’s film performances, or so I thought, I was intrigued, and went looking for a quirky Canadian feature called YOU ARE HERE, written and directed by Daniel Cockburn. While I adore TRIGGER, and particularly Tracy’s performance in that film, once I took a look at YOU ARE HERE, I understood what that reviewer was getting at. YOU ARE HERE is really a series of inter-connected vignettes, and Tracy is just featured in one, she is perhaps the heart of the film, and is the reason that any viewer would connect with the human-side of this film.
“To say YOU ARE HERE is unique, is an understatement. Watching the film is a little bit like dreaming, where random storylines just occur, and behaviors may or may not make sense. Taken as a whole, however, and thinking about the content of each of these vignettes, you may begin to see what they are trying to represent. Cockburn seems to be exploring the way the mind works, and each vignette is emblematic of one of those processes. Problem-solving finds a man in what could be taken for a prison cell, really a featureless room with a table, a chair, and a bookshelf filled with multiple volumes of heavy tomes. A piece of paper is slid under the door, and the man laboriously solves reading comprehension problems in Chinese, which he does not understand. Instead her uses the volumes of books to find the meanings of the characters as described by their shape. Perception is illustrated by a somewhat pompous lecturer instructing a classroom on different ways to view a film of waves, and the different ways you can watch the endless repetitive motion, then introduces a laser pointer and posits the various ways that red dot can change the way we view the waves.Perhaps the most relatable vignette, not surprisingly, the one featuring Tracy, is titled ’The Archivist,’ wherein a young woman seeks to describe and catalog an endless series of random objects that she finds out in the world, with the hope of eventually understanding them as a whole. It seems to be representing the way the brain uses memory to understand things. There are other vignettes, some more difficult to understand featuring doors leading to nowhere, or people in phone centers randomly directing others to travel from one point to another, but they are all fascinating to watch, and amusing in the way certain characters move from one vignette to the next.
“It’s a daring film, and one that some my find pretentious and tedious. I was rather fascinated by it, and have a desire to watch again to see how it plays out now that I know where it’s going. A final word about Tracy. In many ways the film unfolds like a series of scientific experiments. Tracy’s archivist is logical and methodical in her work, and for much of her early screen time, she doesn’t speak at all, except for a few random lines indicating where she is shelving an object. Later, when she becomes frustrated by the fact that things in the archive seem to be rearranging themselves without her knowledge, her frustration and confusion immediately pull involve the viewer in a more personal way than most of the other vignettes. Tracy is that person that everyone can relate to, and she does this in a way that is not showy, not over-dramatic, but oh so real. I say, both TRIGGER and YOU ARE HERE combined, are a better representation of Tracy’s career, and even both together, they just scratch the surface. 4 cats“