WHITE REINDEER
US, 2013, 82 minutes, Colour.
Anna Margaret Hollyman, Laura Lemar- Goldsborough, Lydia Hyslop, Joe Swanberg.
Directed by Zach Clark.
White reindeer is a different kind of Christmas story. Suzanne is a real estate agent, selling a home to a couple who want to move in, are in love and want a bigger big house – but they are afraid of stories of break-ins. Suzanne reassures them.
Suzanne’s husband, Jack, is the local weather man on the television and comes home to surprise her that they are going to Hawaii. On a high, she goes out to shop for Christmas decorations and returns to find her husband dead on the floor, killed by an intruder.
While Suzanne keeps fairly calm on the surface, speaking to the police and answering questions for their investigation, talking with her parents, friends who come to the funeral and offer help, there is some turmoil under the surface. The film has captions indicating various days before Christmas, building up to the day itself and Suzanne’s experience.
She moves away from her parents – who want their son to come home for Christmas but blurt out at meal that they are separating. Suzanne does shopping therapy, going out, overusing her card, but also doing shopping online, filling the house with all kinds of Christmas paraphernalia.
A friend, her husband’s co-worker, comes weeping and informs her that her husband was having an affair after they went to a strip club, continuing for some months but then breaking it off.
Suzanne seems to deal quietly with this, amazed, discovering pornography on her husband’s computer. One night, she decides to go to the club, enquires after Autumn, the name of the girl from the affair, meets her and they have some conversation as well as some silences, ending with Autumn embracing her. Later, Autumn phones her and invites her to come to the club, where Suzanne begins dancing, resists, at first, the invitation to take cocaine, but eventually does so, dancing, being taken home by Autumn and being sick.
The bond between Suzanne and Autumn grows, and Suzanne goes to Macy’s with the other girls to do some alleged shopping which is really shoplifting and Suzanne is arrested and put in jail, the detective coming to see her there. He tells her that the offender has struck again, with a similar pattern.
The friendship grows between Suzanne and Autumn whose real name is Fantasia. She meets Fantasia’s daughter, is bewildered after a night out and sleeps it off at Fantasia’s mother’s house, becoming friendly with her as well then, after the mother gets sick, acting as a babysitter for the little girl.
She goes to visit the couple in their new house and mentions that she didn’t get an invitation to their housewarming party. The two seem rather ingenuous but decide to invite her – and, when she arrives, she finds that it is a sex party with partner swapping going on, and she gets caught up in this as well.
After all this physical, psychological and moral collapse, but benefiting by the friendship with Fantasia and her family, she has a dream where the Spirit of Christmas Present appears to her and they have a discussion about her life and her future.
The film is a strange mixture, written, directed and edited by Zach Clark, presenting a great deal of ordinariness, an ordinary couple, a working couple, in love, ambitious, with an enormous change for the wife after her husband’s death, and the descent into some kind of hellish experiences at the strip club, cocaine, drinking, shoplifting, as well as self-indulgence at the sex party. And then, her friends come Carol singing, she goes to church with her family, singing hymns with hope from this Spirit of Christmas Present.
