The eerie and mysterious short film from the 80s by Sara Driver

Sara Driver’s 1981 (debut?) film, You Are Not I, a little to short to be a feature but too brief (49 minutes) to be a short subject, defies classification in many ways. It’s sometimes called a horror film, a study in character, an experimental work, a literary homage, and it’s all of those things as well as rating high on the creepiness scale. It’s not a great film – it looks and feels in many ways like a grad-student project, which maybe it was: just a few actors w/ speaking parts, very few settings, dialog mostly taken, I assume, directly from the source material (a short story by Paul Bowles), yet there’s something about the film that transcends its short-comings. In fact, the roughness of the film adds to the aura: It’s clearly low-budget, evoking the look and feel of classic low-rent horror. In short, the story line such as it is: A young woman wanders off the grounds of what we later learn to be a mental institution; she seems to take advantage of the confusion caused by a major car accident (some of the footage show incredible plumes of black smoke from one of the cars – not sure how that was shot or staged, or if it were serendipitous, at least for Driver) and leaves the grounds of the institution (after stopping to gaze at the bodies in body bags – and putting stones in the mouths of the dead!). The woman gets a ride to her sister’s how, somewhere in the countryside maybe 50 miles or so away (seems to be short in northernmost New Jersey), and her sister is quite clearly upset by this burden showing up unannounced, and she arranges for hospital attendants to come by and re-claim their patient. Things don’t work out as planned (no spoilers). Much of story is told by the lead actor, Suzanne Fletcher, in a lugubrious voice-over; when others speak, their voices are weirdly amplified, and we sense that this is how the narrator experiences the voices of others. The film is shot (by the now-famous director Jim Jarmusch) in extremely grainy b/w, which gives the whole enterprise the look of a found object from a much earlier period. I wouldn’t make too great a claim for the film – it does not seem to be a message film for women’s rights or the rights of those w/ mental illness – but it does grip you and give you a sense of the world as seen and lived by the troubled and disturbed.