What does it take to make it in showbiz? It’s a question that’s been addressed in all manner of cinema since the medium’s inception, but there are relatively few examples of this familiar scenario that have been taken in quite such a bold direction as that of In Camera.
Receiving its world premiere in the Proxima competition in Karlovy Vary, the film is the feature debut of exciting British talent Naqqash Khalid, who is ably supported by a strong cast and team of collaborators. A shifting portrait of a young man in search of his big break, this drama is filled with experimental flourishes and seems indicative of the kind of uncompromising vision that the Proxima competition was formed to champion.
Aden (Nabhaan Rizwan) is an aspiring actor; “I’m auditioning,” he perennially tells people when they ask whether they’d have seen him in anything. That process of looking for work is effectively the context – or perhaps more accurately, the milieu – within which In Camera takes place. The audience is introduced to Aden in a world of demoralising screen tests, method workshops, and awkward conversations about late rent payments with his doctor flatmate, Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne). The film opens on the set of a buzzy cop drama in which Aden has been cast as a cadaver, soon revealed to have been caked in Kensington Gore in his own clothes and subsequently ejected from set to walk home covered in blood spatter with the promise of a dry-cleaning refund.
Khalid is not overly interested in typical narrative structures, instead, the story (for want of a better word) is assembled from an array of splintered moments. The director, who also wrote the film, described the project as being like a concept album, where sequences are placed in concert, like songs on a record. There are some instances in which these discrete fragments coalesce into complementary patterns and others in which they jolt and jar. The weave of time and the boundaries of reality seem to be constantly eliding and it creates an unsettling environment that evokes the messiness and contradictions of life, but with the strangeness dial turned right up to eleven.
There are narrative throughlines amongst this, but they’re akin to leitmotifs, recurring in different places and sometimes quite distinct from previous iterations. Aden and Bo take on a new flatmate, Conrad (an excellent Amir El-Masry), who’s a smooth-talker that works in fashion. His effortless charisma and apparent affluence are cast in stark relief to Aden’s quiet reserve. Bo – who has his own line in off-kilter dreamlike sequences – is somewhat taken with Conrad, while Aden remains a little more inscrutable. In another thread, Aden takes a small job with a therapist in which he is asked to play a woman’s deceased son, in a counselling session, to help with her grief. Later, the woman asks him to reprise the role for her and her husband at their home. While Aden commits to the performance, the evening goes badly in a stomach-churning sequence that takes its toll on all three of them and the audience.
The fact that Aden seems to slip so effortlessly into the role of the deceased son highlights the complicated relationship he has with notions of performance throughout the film. As a young British Asian man, he is attempting to break into an industry that has not, historically, been accommodating to those like him. While Conrad tries to convince him that “this is our time, we’ve got to use it” and that he’s going to break Hollywood one day, the auditions reinforce a hopeless, contradictory status quo. Equally, while Aden might stand in depressing rooms filled with other young men that look like him, and audition for rote-looking parts – a high school jock, a bearded terrorist – these don’t feel like genuine roles for him. He might tell Conrad that acting is “just reading the lines on the page,” but for Aden, performance is something far more intrinsic, nebulous, and potentially dangerous, than any of that would suggest.
This is exemplified by Rizwan’s own performance, which is nothing short of revelatory. Aden is, to all intents and purposes, a blank slate when we meet him. He seems reticent in social situations and spends much of the film passive in scenes where others are more animated and assertive. However, when Tasha Black’s camera punches in, which it does a great deal throughout proceedings, Rizwan’s anything but passive. When he’s not openly playing somebody else, he’s often inexpressive, but that façade masks the watchfulness of a diligent emotional intelligence. The ease with which he inhabits real people – which becomes all the more troubling and surreal as the film reaches its climax – is exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. Much like the film’s fragmentary structure, Aden is an equally multi-faceted character and Rizwan’s ability to encompass all of these elements into a morphing, cohesive whole is extraordinary.
Director, screenplay: Naqqash Khalid
Cast: Nabhaan Rizwan, Amir El-Masry, Rory Fleck Byrne
Producers: Juliette Larthe, Mary Burke
Cinematography: Tasha Back
Editing: Ricardo Saraiva
Music: Clark
Sound: Paul Davies
Art director: Guy Thompson
Production companies: Prettybird Ltd, Public Dreams Ltd, Uncommon Creative Studio (UK)
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Proxima)
In English
96 minutes
