Living in Oblivion

On one level the story is set during the filming of an American low-budget independent film. On another, the film is about the thoughts and dreams of the film crew - the director, cameraman, the script girl etc. It glides playfully between the actual film shoot, the dreams of the crew, and the story being filmed. The narrative is difficult to grasp; as soon as you think you've decided what you think about the film it takes a new turn and you have to start again. We can never quite believe what we see. Tom DiCillo's metafilm is therefore partly a game, playing with the audience's expectations about what is going to happen and what has happened - you can never be sure where you are in the film. At the end of the film the two stories, the film in the film and the film we see, merge together; the characters who fall in love in one do so eventually in the other. The love story that links the metafictive with the fictive is reminiscent of Karel Reisz's film The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), a film DiCillo's has much in common with. Living in Oblivion is a compact film, permeated with black humour and dramatic turns. ''This is a dream, it doesn't have to make sense!'', exclaims the director in the film, superbly played by Steve Buscemi, known from Jim Jar-musch's Mystery Train (1989) among others. A line that can be seen as a comment on film in general, and in particular Living in Oblivion. The viewer is helped through this good humoured labyrinth of diegetic turns, of both black and white and colour sequences, by Jim Farmer's music. The film is reminiscent of both Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour, 1959, Providence, 1976, Smoking and No Smoking, 1993) and TV series by Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective and Lipstick on Your Collar). The film supplies an insight into filming with the accompanying mental strain and chaos - everything from microphones visible in the frame to communication problems with erratic actors. Tom DiCillo has in Living in Oblivion made a film that naturally reflects not only it's own creation but also it's genre affiliation. PAS