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| Peter Greene in Clean, Shaven |
Cast: Peter Greene, Megan Owen, Jennifer McDonald, Jack McDonald, Molly Casteloe, Jill Chamberlain, Alice Levitt, Roget Jolly, J. Dixon Byrne, Eliot Rockett, Lee Kayman, Rob Benevides, June Kelly. Screenplay: Lodge Kerrigan. Cinematography: Teodoro Maniaci. Production design: Tania Ferrier. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Hahn Rowe.
Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven is a sensitive, accomplished portrait of a schizophrenic somewhat undermined by the imposition of a detective story on the material. Peter Greene hauntingly plays a deinstitutionalized mental patient, Peter Winter, searching for the daughter, Nicole (Jennifer McDonald), who was put up for adoption after he was hospitalized. When a girl Nicole's age is found bludgeoned to death, a detective (Jack McDonald) in charge of the case begins to suspect that Peter may have been her killer. Eventually the two men come together, but the film never resolves the question of whether Peter actually killed the little girl. This inconclusiveness, and the absence of some of Peter's backstory, including his experiences while institutionalized and his ill-fated marriage, leaves us with more questions than the film needs to be fully satisfactory. Its real strength lies in the ambiance that Kerrigan creates around Peter, a haunting mixture of radio static and voices, along with natural sounds like wind and bird calls, amplified to suggest his perpetual edginess and lack of balance.
