I try not to go into the films I watch with any specific expectations. I like to be surprised. But it’s tough not to develop expectations, even minimal ones, after watching, say, a trailer or reading a synopsis. A good synopsis is an exercise in understatement, a good trailer gives you a taste of the film’s vibe and premise without putting the whole story up on the screen. If nothing else, they give me an idea of whether or not I’m likely to like or dislike a film. So I rarely if ever go in completely blind, but every now and then, I’ll watch something that, for good or ill, manages to sidestep my expectations and deliver something I wasn’t expecting.
In Fabric is just such a film - what any of the press would lead you to believe is a campy story about a cursed dress ends up being something entirely other, an acid-etched portrait of English life in the mid-to-late 70s, drawn in stark caricature.
We open on a montage of still images, a technique that used to be common in television decades ago. But soon enough, shots of shoppers and crowds on city streets give way to more unsettling things - mannequins, a face frozen in a scream, a bound wrist. It’s not clear what any of it means, but a sense of unease lingers. And we then meet Sheila Woolchapel. She’s what once might have been called “a woman of a certain age,” with a mostly-grown, mostly-self-absorbed son. She’s a bank teller, separated from her husband for long enough that she’s taken to placing ads in what was then called the “lonely hearts” section of the local paper. Dating back then was no easier, nor any more forgiving, than it is today. You just have to wait a few days to get an envelope in the post to find out who the creeps are instead of a few minutes. It’s hard to watch Sheila navigate the world of being single and lonely. She doesn’t get a lot of respect from her son Vince, or from Vince’s girlfriend Gwen. Work is the kind of corporate-speak nightmare that Office Space illustrated so well, with the added frisson of sexism that makes the quality of your smile or the duration of your bathroom breaks a matter for evaluation. Sheila can’t catch a break for trying.
But it’s the winter sales season, when all of the major department stores mark down their remaining stock to make room for next year’s lines. And so Sheila - in preparation for a date that ends up being exactly as disastrous as you’d imagine - goes to Dentley & Soper’s Trusted Department Store to find a nice dress. Something to help her feel beautiful, and if she’s lucky, at a really good price. And she does exactly that - she finds a lovely red dress that fits her just right. Which is odd, because its listed size is much too small for her. And why does the clerk ask her for her address and phone number? And what about the embroidered writing on an inside seam, in another language? Not to mention the fate of the model who first wore the dress. That very same dress.
Only one of them was made, after all.
From the moment Sheila takes the dress home, things start to go wrong - the date doesn’t go well, she gets a strange rash, her washing machine breaks catastrophically, she starts to have strange dreams. But this is not a film exclusively concerned with a cursed dress. This is a film that looks at life in England at that point in time through a cracked lens, one that lets the light leak through and shifts everything askew. Dentley & Soper’s is a very, very strange department store, with employees who dress like something out of Edward Gorey and talk like language itself is their second language. And what happens in the store after hours, once all of the salespeople have been put away for the night, well, it’s never really explained, but it has a kind of internal logic, the way things make perfect sense in a dream, but when you try to explain them out loud upon waking crumble into utter nonsense. The store’s ads on television - no dialogue, just images - are a cryptic rush of gesticulating employees and mannequins, broken up and smeared by tracking errors and chromatic aberration into something almost entirely abstract. And nobody seems to think this is unusual.
Likewise, as the film progresses, the initially stultifying business-speak of Sheila’s employers starts to become surreal, the narrative calcifies into repeated motifs - of dialogue, of imagery, broken up by more montage. And without giving away too much, the dress is the one constant throughout, as it becomes clear that it, not Sheila, is the protagonist, the one we’re following. It’s not clear (nor is it unclear, we feel what it is rather than know what it is) what the dress’s provenance really is, but wherever it is, there follows misery and ruin. Accidents happen, vegetables wither and rot, and attempts to destroy or return it fail. As someone from the department store says, the purpose of the seasonal sale is to…expunge.
It’s all shot very much as a period piece in terms of design and costuming, though not to the point that we’re meant to think it’s an artifact of that time. It’s more like the filmmakers recognized the inherent strangeness of that period and wanted to jack it up as loud as it would go. There’s something about brass and velvet and wood veneer that communicates…not luxury, but rather some approximation of luxury on the cheap, and it’s evocative. Mannequins figure heavily throughout, and their blank expressions and rictus posture, both human and utterly not, seem to serve as kind of a central thesis, along with the equally blank faces and poses of catalog models, staring off into space, looking at things we can’t see while wearing the latest in casual sportswear. The soundtrack leans heavily on dissonant electronics, and combined with the interstitial montages serves to reinforce this idea of a placid surface thinly papering over the madness underneath. All throughout, the people we follow and the world they inhabit disintegrate into chaos, the veneer of civility cracking to loose snarling animals underneath. Everything and everyone becomes stranger and less tethered to reality as the film goes on. And above it all, the dress flows and drifts and billows, inexorably red. Like blood from a syringe, blooming in water.
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