First screened at Sundance over a year ago, Compliance only made it to UK screens last Friday and is unlikely to linger thereon far past next Friday before sliding off onto DVD. Based on a series of real-life incidents across America, it depicts the ordeal of a fast food restaurant employee (Dreama Walker) when she is accused of stealing by the ‘policeman’ who rings her place of work.
Sandra (Ann Dowd) is the manager of the restaurant taking directions from the man we find out very quickly is a prank caller. She and her staff are, at every step, convinced to carry out the ‘police procedures’ dictated by the caller whose demands become increasingly disturbing as the ordeal continues.
It begins in a typically indie-serious manner with a series of still life shots (a shopping trolley, a stack of boxes, some pans) underscored by a driving cello ostinato. As the characters are introduced and the situation set up, it has the awkward feel of a sort of GCSE Psychology educational drama made to teach students how conformity works. Maybe this is because I knew what was coming but so does everyone – the film’s plot is detailed in its synopsis.
One major gripe of a great number of people who have seen the film is how unrealistic it seems that everyone at the restaurant complies with the caller, with no proof that he is a genuine officer of the law, to the extent that the innocent girl, Becky, is thoroughly humiliated and plainly abused.
Director Craig Zobel of course can, and does, hide behind the true story that inspired his film. Speaking on Radio 5live, he explained its partly negative reception at Sundance last year:
‘Everyone’s reactions, when they hear these stories is, “well I would never do that, I would never listen, I would know it was a fake” yet it happens all the time… there are certain people that are not comfortable imagining themselves ever being in that place and reject that idea.’
Fair enough, these things do happen, and this particular event actually did. Earlier in the interview, Zobel demonstrates his familiarity with Stanley Milgram’s conformity experiments which illustrate that it is indeed horrific the things humans will do if an authority figure tells them to. But when viewing a film, obviously people are going to get angry and mistrustful if their engagement with the story isn’t sufficient enough for them to suffer the same lack of moral judgement as the characters on screen do.
It would be an incredible feat to pull this off – the best bet might have been to attempt to fool the audience into believing that the caller was a real policeman, which would necessitate less of a giveaway title than Compliance and more secrecy in the media. But here’s the real problem – the media can’t describe the film in any other way than revealing the caller to be a prankster because the film is made in such a way that its only focus, only point of interest is how people respond to a fake authority figure. Like I said, it feels too much like an educational film and while watching it, I constantly pictured the director nodding sagely mouthing the words “it can happen”. OK Craig Zobel, yes it can, but while you treat your characters like dummies whose only purpose is to illustrate a textbook case, the message isn’t really hitting home.
This leads neatly to the second big problem of the film: with the characters, especially Becky, often looking and behaving robotically, it invites accusations of exploitation. Because we aren’t invested in the verisimilitude of events (even if we do accept that they really happened), as the film progresses and the central actress loses more and more clothes, there rises a creeping suspicion that the film is starting to play to the male gaze. Zobel doesn’t help himself by moving the camera behind a storage cabinet while Becky removes particular items of clothing. Rather than protecting the actress’ modesty with an artsy tracking shot, this moment comes across more as a tease. The ‘you can see this, but you can’t see that’ attitude is a big moment of discomfort. If the film was serious about depicting a real event/tackling a serious issue, surely the way to confront something is to represent it clinically, entirely. The way the director handled this moment reeked of exploitation.
If you’re going to make an exploitation film, fine; it isn’t a crime, there are some sleazy merits to doing so. If you’re going to make a serious issue docudrama, then do that instead. I’m sure there are some rare genius instances where the two can be combined but in this case, they most definitely shouldn’t be.
To pay Zobel his due, his writing, especially for ‘Officer Daniels’ (Pat Healy), does at times display a good understanding of the psychology behind coercion and conformity. I believe he has a thorough apprehension of the subject and even good intentions. The trouble is, he is much too impressed with the knowledge on a theoretical level and seems to delight in imparting the shocking news that human beings are far too enamoured with anybody who wears a uniform to think clearly. What he needed to do was force us to see it through good characterisation, without clouding the issue with suspicious exploitative moments.
Jon Bates Writes 