Strawberry Mansion: a delightful satire good enough to eat

The last century has supplied no shortage of dystopian movies, but recently – and it’s not hard to see why – they’ve been showing up in droves. Since these films have tended towards the dark and doom-laden, it’s refreshing to see a dystopian satire with rather a different tone, from co-directors, co-screenwriters and co-stars Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. Strawberry Mansion uses fantasy and good humour to make its satirical points all the more effective, in ways that recall Michel Gondry, Jan Švankmajer, and Terry Gilliam at his most whimsical.

It’s 2035, and the powers that be – the government in cahoots with the ad industry, essentially – have discovered not only how to tax people for objects that appear in their dreams (a hot-air balloon: $2; a buffalo: 5¢) but to introduce into those dreams consumer products that spark cravings when the dreamers wake.

James Preble (Audley) – schmuckishly dressed, 1950s-style, in suit, tie and trilby hat, with slicked-back hair and a mousy ‘tache – is a ‘dream tax auditor’ tasked with ensuring that citizens pay all due taxes on their dream items. He himself is dreaming when we first meet him, ensconced in a nauseatingly all-pink kitchen, into which erupts his Hawaiian-shirted ‘buddy’ (Linas Phillips) bearing a bucket of ‘Cap’n Kelly’s Chicken’ and a litre of ‘Red Rocket Cola’. So effective is this suggestion that, having woken, Preble stops off at the nearest Cap’n Kelly’s, where the animated sales-chicken sells him not only a bucketful of fried bird but a helping of ‘chicken shake’.

And so to the roseate gothic pile of Strawberry Mansion, whose proprietor, a sweet little old lady named Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller) has, it turns out, been preserving all her dreams on over 2,000 VHS tapes – an expressly forbidden enterprise. Preble starts viewing the tapes through a huge papier-mâché headpiece. And from here on in it’s dream within dream within dream, featuring – amid much else – a tenor sax-playing frog-waiter, a skyborne demon (both played by Birnley), a frigate captained by Preble and crewed by mice, a field full of foliage-clad humanoids, jellyfish, sea caterpillars, and a lovely young woman with whom Preble falls in love, and who proves to be Arabella’s younger self.

All this is achieved with handcrafted effects whose modest budget never proves constricting, backed by a lively, evocative, synthy score from Dan Deacon and enriched by Tyler Davis’s saturated cinematography. Some may find the soft-toned inventiveness of Strawberry Mansion a little too sweet to take; but relax into it and the film’s romantic charm and subversive satire should soon weave their spell.

► Strawberry Mansion is in UK cinemas now.