Playing the Game

I don't know why you think you're such a dirty, dirty bitch.

You know I know how your momma got rich.

If my momma was rich

I wouldn't be in this ditch

You low down, useless, ugly old witch.

THIS IS DOZENS, a vicious, angry, game rooted in the Black ghetto culture of our country, a ritual in which participants vent physical hostility through a series of rhymes and insults. When we first meet the young woman portrayed in Christine Dall and Randall Conrad's The Dozens, she is yelling at a correctional officer, playing the game, sharpening the instincts that serve her as well in the outside world as they do in prison.

Convicted of forging checks, Sally (Debra Margolies) has been sentenced to a six-year term at the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Framingham. However, only two years into the sentence, a sympathetic parole board grants her freedom at 21. Life outside smacks of trouble. She returns to an estranged husband, Sonny (Edward Mason), and a four-year-old child who has been told her mother was "in the hospital." Room and board no longer come courtesy of the taxpayer's dollar. Finding it impossible to make ends meet, she turns to Sonny for help, and he, needing capital to start a laundromat business, joins in a "safe" cocaine-dealing ring. Is Sally out for good? Maybe not. Sonny operates from her apartment, implicating her in his crimes, as he had in their forging operation.

Dall and Conrad avoid making Sally's fate obvious by the introduction of unpredictable elements and a dynamic tension created by a slowly emerging subplot. The calculated use of humor prevents the story line from lapsing into static dramatic inevitability. Conrad and Dall frequently objectify Sally's viewpoint by allowing her to comment upon what has happened, or what is occurring within a given shot. While the image remains intact, her voice, satirizing the dramatic situation or directly addressing the audience, comes from off the screen. She second-guesses our reading of the film ("I'll bet you're saying, 'This is where she's going to mess up.' Right? Wrong."), providing comic relief within an otherwise somber thematic structure. As in reality, it's not safe to assume what will come next.

This emphasis on reality, or ontological authenticity, accounts for the strong documentary texture of the film. Avoiding the hermetic environment of the studio, Conrad and Dall shoot on location in Cambridge, Boston, Somerville and Framingham. The world seen through the camera--Park Street, Government Center. Ambassador-Brattle cabs, and tired triple-decker houses in bleak neighborhoods--is tangibly familiar and particularly relevant. Sally rides the T. and her friends write messages on her copy of The Harder They Come. Although written two years ago, the script remains timely in its content. This augments the realism; for example, the state, due to decreasing funds for social services, cancels the vocational education program in which Sally has enrolled, leaving her in financial limbo.

WHILE THE ESTABLISHMENT of an authentic base makes Sally's portrait refreshingly convincing, Conrad and Dall animate through the imposition of various cinematic devices. The first segment of the film, in prison, moves at a brisk pace--cuts are quick, shot-counter-shot and reverse angle sequences accent confrontational situations as in her appearance before the parole committee. When it comes time to cope with the outside world, the use of rapid zoom makes us actively feel the threat of her new environment. In filming elegant clothing, (objects of Sally's material aspirations), Conrad and Dall deliberately place the camera before the store window. She sees what she wants, but she will never get it. Life is governed by work in the purse factory, or, as manifested in the film's ending, by the profound impact of bureaucratic inefficiency.

Upon rare occasion, the effects of directorial interjection whet our appetite for issues that are never examined. Dall and Conrad rely on a conventional flashback series, first depicting Sally arriving at Framingham as a bellicose, hand-cuffed delinquent, then as a demure young lady applying make-up to her eyes, which cast arrogant glances on those of whom she disapproves. She has undergone a metamorphosis that is never explained or justified during the course of a cursory, several shot treatment.

Perhaps this lapse into cinematic superficiality is a problem inherent in the nature of the short, low-budget film. In Dozens this is merely a minor flaw far outweighed by superb directorial sensibility and the outstanding performance of the actors. The camera rarely strays from Margolies, who plays a sensitive mother as well as the crude, masculine game of dozens. Her experience as a stage actress, primarily at the Stage One Company, lies beneath her effortless virtuosity. Her Sally is highly feminine, but not stylized--a pig-tailed, funky adult who speaks low and jivey. Mason is a naturally-grinning blond whose well-practised mannerisms reek of reflex criminality: the archetypal detriment to Sally's hope for a clean life.

THROUGH SALLY'S ORDEAL, we focus our attention upon the endless obstacle course that prevents her assimilation into society. The perpetuation of her role as a member of a deprived working class and the temptation of crime in order to survive are just a part of the stacked deck that she faces upon her release from prison. None of these issues are ever resolved. Nor should they be. In a straight-line narrative feature, questions are raised and answered within the course of the film; what makes Dozens unique is a marked sense of open-endedness. Certainly, Sally's portrayal is made extremely subjective in the directors' choice of cinematic language. Yet the film's seed in reality grows to encompass issues beyond those of most current films. In times of multi-million-dollar fiascos and successes that lack significant content. The Dozens stands as proof that there are effective alternatives.