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Clean Freak is the rather obsessive brain child of documentary filmmaker Chris Hansen. Designed to essentially map his own tendency to obsessively clean the messes constantly around him, a camera follows Hansen around as he looks into his own family’s driving forces, the cleaning tendency in other obsessive compulsive people, what treatments are currently in place, and whether he can find a solution to OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) for himself.
Content
The propensity to do things obsessively is something that most people can relate to. Ironically, people suffering from both OCD and ADD—which seem like polar opposites of one another—have very similar compulsive traits. For example, the OCD person will see a messy room, feel unable to relax around the mess, and have to clean it, utilizing a controlled system to do so. The ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) person, on the other hand, will see a messy room, be overwhelmed by the mess, and have to clean it, but will become distracted by each new thing that needs to be cleaned before fully cleaning a section of a room. (As such, OCD people are seen as being the most successful at their compulsions, whereas ADD people are often seen as being bumbling idiots. This is why, unlike OCD individuals, ADD adults usually train themselves to completely ignore their day to day physical surroundings, which can actually result in them becoming complete slobs.)
The desire to focus on this subject is an excellent one and the characters that appear in the film are idiosyncratic and enjoyable, causing you to stay readily drawn in to the concepts of the film. Hansen’s realization that he’s got a problem and his attempt to find solutions through drugs, hypnosis, and support groups are all engaging and bizarrely humorous.
Unfortunately, this is where Clean Freak runs into problems. The line between reality and comedy is a little too blurred in this piece. Hansen’s inclination to recreate humorous scenes “after the fact”, and clever cutting, make the film feel like a pretty smart mockumentary. Much like Hansen’s last film, The Care and Feeding of an American Messiah) which is replete with strangely ludicrous scenes such as one scene where he comes to believes that St. John’s Wart is an illegal drug and breaks the fourth wall to ask the student cameraman filming him to “score” some for him. (Another humorous scene, although this one is much less comfortable for the audience, involves a bizarrely “touchy” hypnotherapist trying to run his hands across Hansen’s body to “heal” him from his affliction, while asking him to repeat a mantra that he “trusts” the doctor.) However, when Hansen interviews seemingly real people suffering with the affliction or when he’s unwilling to tuck his own child into bed because the room is “too messy”, we feel like we’re in a serious documentary in which it’s no longer permissible to laugh. As such, I would personally love to see the short’s editing altered in such a way as to either be a documentary with some humorous elements (such as the widely acclaimed, American Movie, or the underground hit, The King of Kong) or a straight mockumentary (such as, This is Spinal Tap or Hansen’s past film, Care & Feeding of an American Messiah).
Visual Look
The Visual look of this piece is all over the board. Even though the majority of the footage was acquired with the DVX100 (the same type of camera as was used for Rock School and Murderball), much of it looked pretty vastly different. Hansen had his students help out with camera duties, which resulted in some pretty divergent looks. While documentaries are always going to have differences in look, based on what locations they’re shooting in, special attention must be paid to maintaining sharp focus. (My personal recommendation is, whenever possible, to use an external monitor or laptop outfitted with Scopebox [Mac]/ Onlocation [PC] to make sure tight focus is achieved.) As it was, there were a number of scenes in which the focus was a little too soft, indicating that it was either out of focus in acquisition or that the shot was too wide and Hansen zoomed in digitally in post. (For most situations, digitally zooming more than 15% will result in noticeably soft footage to the viewer, especially if they’re watching it on an HD screen or computer monitor.)
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