Cinema
Cube (15, selected cinemas)
Not so square
Mark Steyn
There's a scene in John Maybury's new film Love is the Devil in which Francis Bacon has an orgasm watching Battleship Potemkin. Now that's what I call a motion picture. Sadly, I can't remember the last film that roused me to what Ken Starr calls `completion', and every time I try to think of potentially orgasmic movies I find myself recalling the moment in Naked Gun 33 when Leslie Nielsen goes undercover at a sperm donor clinic and the nurse asks him if an erotic video would help. 'Have you got Dances with Wolves?' he says. If anything, I find a kind of anticipatory brewer's droop kicks in at the mere thought of certain films.
`What's this Cube thing about?' I asked a friend. She explained that it's about a group of people who wake up to find them- selves wearing grey overalls and trapped in an unending series of bare 14' x 14' x 14' cubes stretching to infinity. The heart sank. I was sure I'd seen this on stage in some Islington fringe theatre in the Seventies. Even if you've never been to Islington and weren't born till 1979, it's the sort of thing you feel you saw in Islington in the Seven- ties: it's one of those generic meaningless- ness-of-human-existence concepts. Cube sounded as if it would be dreadfully square and go around in circles.
But amazingly, in the hands of Canadian directorial novice Vincenzo Natali, it's a lot of fun. Even before the title, one member of the small cast comes a cropper when the room he steps into turns out to be, as one character puts it, 'a giant sushi machine' which slices and dices the poor fellow like a beetroot. That leaves five: a cop, an ex-con, a doctor, a brainy college girl and a guy who, playing the sub-Beckett existential stuff for laughs, thinks that 'life just sucks in general'. 'Not all of us have the luxury of playing nihilist,' says the cop. But before we can get into any consideration of luxuri- ous nihilist playing, a mental incompetent with an assorted bag of nervous tics shows up.
Nobody knows why they've been dumped in this endless maze. 'It's like Chile. They always come in the middle of the night,' says Holloway, the lady doctor. 'Only the military-industrial complex could afford to build something this big.' The building is, indeed, almost literally a military-industrial complex: metal rooms of identical size, each face of which has an airlock hatch leading to another room, possibly booby- trapped with killer laser beams, poison gases, face-eating acids and so on. Each hatch contains a sequence of numerals which our merry band assume at first are simply room numbers — a worrying thought given that they're nine figures long. But then the brainy bespectacled girl Leaven (as is traditional in this genre, each character is known only by his or her last name, conveniently printed on the breast pocket of each set of overalls) figures out that, if any of the numbers is prime, the room is trapped. When this theory proves to be too simple, Spectacle Gal thinks again and decides that in fact the numbers are coded Cartesian co-ordinates of the building's map. By now, though, tensions are beginning to emerge in the group. Quentin the cop, for one, would evidently prefer just to beat the crap out of his confr- eres and bust his way out. Leaven, though, persuades him that it's better to put Descartes before da force. But even she is sorely put upon when the mentally ill guy decides to take a leak in the corner of the room. 'Oh, gross,' she says. 'Now it like totally reeks in here.'
As you'll have gathered, young person's dialogue is not exactly Vincenzo Natali's forte. But he has his moments, especially when they're trying to figure out just what the building is and why they've been walled up inside it. 'It's a forgotten perpetual pub- lic works project,' reckons Worth. But why imprison folks inside it? 'You have to use it,' he says, 'or admit it's pointless.' But it is pointless,' says Quentin. 'That's my point,' says Worth.
The cast of Cube includes Nicole de Boer as Leaven and Maurice Dean Wint as Quentin: that's to say, they're mostly unknowns. This gives the film a strong advantage when, inevitably, the dramatis personae start getting bumped off: unlike Hollywood films, you can't tell from the casting in what order they're going to die. On the other hand, it has to be said that most of the acting is not very good. What the film does have, though, is a sure sense of how to spook its audience and how to pursue the logic of a puzzle plot to a satis- fying conclusion The movie prompts titters from some movie-goers, but big deal, so does Star Wars. For this territory, you have to have the courage to be risible.
By the way, try to see it, as I did in Cana- da, in a multi-storey indoor shopping mall at a poorly attended late screening. When I came out, the mall had closed for the evening and I found myself wandering up and down escalators, in and out of pas- sages, trying to find a way to get out. The full Cube effect.
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