There is good news and there is bad news; there is David and there is Goliath. The good news is that you have been selected for the Cannes Film Festival. The bad news is your name is David, or in this case Rob Tregenza.
It is one thing being invited to open the festival when you are a Goliath. When your name is Luc Besson and you have all the weight of Gaumont behind your film, The Fifth Element. It is altogether another thing in Cannes when you are Rob Tregenza and all you have behind your film, Inside/Out, which has been chosen to screen on the opening day of Un Certain Regard, is Parallel Pictures, a loose grouping of independent distributors, of which you are president. Then there is your French press attache who does not quite understand that there are some people who eagerly want to know about your film even before it screens, and when they do want to know, you
are 30,000 feet up in the air with the photos.
So what do we know about Mr Tregenza and his film? We know he is American and that he was born in Kansas in 1950. He is a doctor of philosophy of dramatic art from UCLA and he made his first film, Talking To Strangers, in 1988 followed by The Arc in 1991.
Talking To Strangers just happens to be one of Jean-Luc Godard's favourite films of all time. Not a bad point of reference! How do we know? Because Godard said so when he chose the film in the Dialogue: Talking with Pictures section of the 1996 Toronto Film Festival - a fact that cannot have harmed Tregenza's chances of a Cannes slot for his latest project, Inside/Out.
Inside/Out is the story of Jean Hammett, a French artist in a small American psychiatric hospital, a hospital where time no longer functions in the 'normal' way. Hammett is joined at the hospital by Monique Phillips, who is transferred there after trying to escape from a larger institution. Rejecting her American roots, Phillips becomes obsessed with Hammett, who comes to symbolise freedom. A guard, however, interprets her behaviour as deepening madness.
There is also Roger Freeman, another patient and once a great jazz musician, and the Reverend David Sheppard, an Episcopal priest who believes that if only he can convince the church organist to love him, he can become normal.
Amid the joy and turmoil of the characters' lives inside the hospital some questions start to emerge: Who is inside? Who is out? And who is really free? It could almost be reffering to the Cannes Film Festival!
Christopher Pickard
