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LOOK
Directed & Written by Adam Rifkin
Produced by Brad Wyman & Barry Schuler
Director of Photography, Ron Forsythe
Edited by Martin Apelbaum.
Music by B T
USA. 102 min. Rated R
Released by Vitagraph Films
With Jamie McShane, Spencer Redford, Heather Hogan, Hayes MacArthur, Ben Weber, Paul Schackman, Chris Williams, Giuseppe Andrews, Miles Dougal, Rhys Coiro & Sebastian Feldman.

Look is a technical tour de force that connects Orwell’s Big Brother to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes with Marshall McLuhan’s global village.

Writer/director Adam Rifkin and cinematographer Ron Forsythe structure every shot as if it could have been captured on different kinds of surveillance cameras. The cameras are at home (a nanny-cam in a living room), on a police car dashboard, at work (from offices to storage rooms), and in public places (from ATMs to hotel lobbies), where people may wrongfully assume are private but are not, most pruriently in a dressing room where two teenage girls (Spencer Redford and Heather Hogan) are trying on clothes.

The gimmick is admirably consistent throughout, though it’s doubtful that the actual equipment has such effective microphones to pick up the conversations of the intersecting storylines. One target is hapless insurance company worker Marty (Ben Weber), mercilessly victimized in cubicle wars by his co-workers, much in the mockumentary style of the British and American versions of The Office. The over-the-top harassment by lecherous department store manager Tony Gilbert (played by stand-up comedian Hayes MacArthur) wears thin way before he gets something of a comeuppance. The espying that is the most involving (genuine emotions are revealed) involves the arcs of two married men in different dalliances in different places. Cameras reveal a secret life for one, Ben the lawyer (Paul Schackman), and temptations leading to a momentary lapse of reason for the other, Berry Krebbs, the high school teacher (Jamie McShane).

It could be some controlling entity out of futuristic sci-fi movies, or just a hacker like the isolated agoraphobe in Pierre-Paul Renders’ visually similar Thomas in Love, who is compiling the footage as a voyeur. Sometimes the recording fast forwards, and in one scene rewinds to take in a different point of view, while faces and body parts are selectively and electronically distorted for modesty. Shoplifting, car accidents, abductions, and even murders are recorded with no immediate ramifications. The crime spree by an exaggeratedly cartoonish duo, labeled “The Candid Camera Cop Killers,” is satirized in one scene where a comparable crime turns out to be staged for a film being shot by director John Landis in a funny cameo.

Rifkin conducts a didactic demonstration of the ubiquity of the lack of privacy promulgated by “if you see it, say it” paranoia and Americans’ obliviousness to this expanding, unblinking environment. Where Andrea Arnold’s Red Road incorporated closed-circuit cameras with a much more captivating story, other films have been more pointed and personal even before Big Whoever was watching and listening, from Blowup to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Nora Lee Mandel
December 14, 2007