Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise/Strumpet
review by Carrie Gorringe, 21 September 2001

26th Toronto International Film Festival

"You know what it's like to go to work in a place where people hate you? Exhilarating!" wheezes a corpulent vacuum-cleaner salesman named Tommy (Timothy Spall) to his feckless trainee in Vacuuming Completely Nude In Paradise. Vacuuming is one of two short films from director Danny Boyle (one-half of the team responsible for Trainspotting). Smoking too much and breaking too many traffic laws to count, Tommy is desperate to meet his quota so that he can win JAC Vacuum Company's "Salesman of the Year" award. Tommy's life is his work, with an apartment that's little more than a closet holding the latest suit and a shower, and a taste for entertainment which doesn't extend beyond the endless braying of his self-created motivational tapes during the dash from one sales call to the next. More than his apartment is dirty; he'll foist vacuums upon mothers on the dole who can barely afford to make ends meet, and even pretend to be in love with a woman in order to get her to sign a sales contract. His fellow employees hate him as much for his sleazy demeanor as for his sales totals; in their opinion, his comeuppance should have arrived by yesterday.

Yet, as he bashfully admits to the trainee, he has a spiritual side: he envisions paradise as a place in which one can vacuum uninhibited by worldly demands (hence the film's title). The trainee, for his part, is there only to please the demands of his girlfriend, who is tired of having to support this dreamer of a boyfriend by working as a stripper. Tommy attempts to oblige the trainee to sink to his own repulsive level, but the trainee has another idea about his future employment, one which, in the first of many ironies that punctuate Vacuuming, stands a chance of being realized. In certain respects, the film's ending seems too pat and inevitable, and full of symbolism applied with all the restraint of someone working with an overflowing trowel, but the performances are dead-on. Spall's Tommy charges through the film like a bull in a china shop, as a man whose bluster barely conceals his inner distress and desperate need to have his hard work validated by society; Tommy, however, is racing toward a success that seems to get further and further beyond his reach. He becomes the illustrative example of why success is not a goal, but a progress.

Likewise with Strumpet, with its rags-to-riches storyline involving a brilliant, but emotionally unhinged, street poet and an abused girl who rise and fall in the land of corporate rock. Boyle's examination of how performers are packaged in what Joni Mitchell referred to as the "star-making machinery behind a popular song" is mercilessly funny; the scene in which the two newcomers are in negotiations with the music company, in league with a manager more amateurish than they, is laced with enough mordant wit to make you cringe and laugh simultaneously. You can see the three of them heading straight for the meat grinder fifteen minutes into the film. The question is, however, just what choices they will, or can, make as the machinery threatens to consume their dreams. Despite the harshness of satire that permeates Strumpet, it also contains exquisitely-drawn characterizations, played with such precision, that even in the midst of whatever madness is unfolding on screen, you never lose sight of the band members' need for acceptance, no matter how much they may deny it. Both Vacuuming and Strumpet are inspired examples of how a talented filmmaker can make films that provide a multifaceted picture of humanity without requiring three hours of running time. 

• Main Page
• The Devil's Backbone
• Ichi the Killer
• Full Time Killer
• Beijing Bicycle
• Heist
• Vacuuming Completely Nude in Paradise/Strumpet
• Dark Blue World

• No Man's Land

• Éloge de l'amour
• Amélie from Montmartre
• World Traveler

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