‘Inside/Out’ Is Compelling Look at Reaching Out

Writer-director-cinematographer-editor Rob Tregenza trusts in the purely visual power of the camera and is equally unafraid to place the utmost demands on his viewers. And he rewards the patient with his compelling “Inside/Out,” which takes us into a derelict, only partly inhabited mental institution in some rural, wintry setting, somewhere in the eastern U.S.--judging by the cars, the time looks to be the late ‘50s or early ‘60s.

Right from the start Tregenza makes it clear that he’s interested in images rather than words. His camera picks up a man and a woman running across a field only to be turned back by the chance appearance of a group of hunters on horseback surrounded by a pack of hunting dogs.

Swiftly, the young woman, Monica (Berangere Allaux), is grabbed by two men and placed in a pickup truck, which we follow to that mental institution, a sizable compound of red brick buildings that has the look of a typical small college campus.

What ensues is a kind of slow, erratic dance of life in which people reach out to one another fleetingly, sometimes in kindness, occasionally in confusion and anger, only to withdraw. The inmates, who are not generally mistreated by nurses and guards, do little but wander around aimlessly, occasionally experiencing moments of pleasure, rage and fear.

Gradually, we come to identify various individuals: an Episcopal priest (Tom Gilroy) who presides over the institution’s chapel; his elegant organist (Stefania Rocca) who rejects the priest’s advances but is ultimately drawn to Monica, who in turn is drawn to good-looking French painter Jean (Frederic Pierrot), who in turn is followed around by a mute man, Roger (Steven Watkins), a jazz trumpeter.

Brief skirmishes, the occasional fragment of a conversation or interview, everyday incidents, more than a few cryptic events, even a stab at a party for the inmates, soothed for the moment by the gentle music of a harpist, interrupt but never really break the film’s constant sense of flow, of people connecting and disconnecting, from one another and maybe themselves as well.

Conventional insane asylum movies love to pose the question of who’s really mad, the keeper or the kept, but thankfully Tregenza has something else in mind, which is to quietly invite us to see ourselves in these people in all their longings, their endless reaching out and retreating. By the time “Inside/Out” is over its metaphorical impact resounds but with the power of silence, not noise.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film’s style and themes are decidedly adult. Some brief violence.

‘Inside/Out’

Berangere Allaux: Monica

Frederic Perriot: Jean

Stefania Rocca: Grace, the Organist

Tom Gilroy: The Priest

A Cinema Parallel presentation of a Parallel Pictures and Baltimore Film Factory production. Writer-director-cinematographer Rob Tregenza. Producers J.K. Eareckson and Tom Garvin. Lighting director Arthur Eng. Harp music arranged and performed by Eareckson Mary Tregenza. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Grande 4-Plex, 345 S. Figueroa St., downtown Los Angeles, (213) 617-0268.