Navigating a
pub, Shaun’s anxieties are (quite literally) plastered on his face
You who I don’t know I
don’t know how to talk to you
—What is it like for you there?
– from ‘Sanctuary’ by Jean
Valentine, in Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (2004)
The opening lines of Valentine’s poem capture the disquiet
terrain of the world as seen from the inside out, through the lens of an
anxious psyche. Likewise, in Facing It, a young man of perhaps college age
named Shaun grapples with the feeling of being trapped in the cage of his own
mind, helpless to escape it. The viewer is given access to Shaun’s eyes and
ears. His sensory perspective is dreamlike: imaginative, yet brushing up
against a recognisable reality. But, as you might expect, it’s not a pleasant
dream – his world is populated by characters with strange clay faces that sit
atop human bodies, and their muffled voices echo incomprehensibly. As if
submerged underwater, Shaun is out of his depth.
Following the trajectory of Shaun’s thoughts, the film
floats back in time between the past and the present – the two indelibly
interconnected. In the present, Shaun’s face is a vision of blue melancholy,
melting and dripping as he makes panicked attempts to converse at a pub. We see
these emotions at play, personified in the form of limbs that appear out of
nowhere, stifling his efforts to socialise. Hands push and pull at his face,
pluck out his eyes and cover his mouth mid-conversation; a foot kicks a glass
out of his hand. Flashbacks reveal the ways in which he has become the
embodiment of his past relationships; in particular, the troubled one with his
parents.
To make Shaun’s raw emotions vivid and visceral, the UK
filmmaker Sam Gainsborough deploys a mixed-media technique. Combining
claymation, pixelation and live-action – a laborious and artful process –
Gainsborough blends analogue and digital media. Through handmade indentations
and growths on the clay faces, he inverts Shaun’s inner stress response,
rendering it ever-present and tactile. And by integrating live-action human
bodies and settings, he grounds Shaun’s experience in intertwined physical and
emotional spaces, building an uneasy mood some viewers might find all too
relatable.
By providing a window into Shaun’s internal world,
Gainsborough highlights how our emotions and experiences are more complicated
than even we can see, and tethered to our past, present and imagined future.
The film reminds us that we can’t decode internal states by watching outward
behaviours, since our exteriors are only the tip of a vast iceberg. As the
speaker in Valentine’s poem ponders, even if we ‘imagine other solitudes’ and
‘listen for what it is like there’, it’s impossible to know what it is to be
anyone else but us – even if, as Facing It seems to argue, it’s still worth
trying.
Written by Olivia Hains
