Suspicious Minds

Suspicious Minds is a charming ,nocturnal romance about Lola, a young woman dressed as Dorothy from the "Wizard of Oz," who flees from a rave (and a bad relationship) with the help of an Elvis impersonator and his boom box. Since the action happens at night in a forest, daytime rules get pushed aside in favor of a softer, more magical governance. The characters stumble into that liminal zone where we've all found ourselves at one time - out of the last place but not yet arrived at the next stop, and who the hell is this stranger we're sharing our heart with next to an open fire?

The jazzy mix of live action, animation, fantasy and musical numbers allows writer/director Imelda O'Reilly to create an easy back-and-forth between moods as Elvis and Dorothy walk, talk, sing, dance and ride off into the sunrise. It's an enchanting film told in O'Reilly's singular voice.

"We talked all night" is how two people who meet at a party might characterize the fabulous connection they make with one another. Such evenings are the revered, mythic touchstones of existence. Imelda O'Reilly's SUSPICIOUS MINDS bears this out and more. Her vivid cinematic tapestry, set at a Halloween rave in upstate New York, shatters time, and alters dimension as it fixes on the tenuous beginning of a beautiful friendship, minute-by-minute.

Phil, played with somber wit by Ed Malone, is festooned in a gold lamé suit like Elvis for the occasion. (Though he resembles more Phil Ochs's late 60s sendup of "The King.") Phil receives a sock in the face for his bystander efforts to mediate Lola's public breakup with Charlie, who suspects her of cheating on him. Adorned as a post-punk Dorothy from anything resembling Kansas, Lola (Gina Costigan) pursues Phil to ensure he is not injured badly.

What appears more important in what follows is not the ramifications of their forging a bond but the revelations leading to it. In their ensuing confessions and dreamlike reminiscences, the air is electric with possibility, new and renewed. Weaving the physical and metaphysical with parts animé, mumblecore contemplation, montage, and smash cuts, the two Irish ex-pats engage from the get-go. I thought of early Fellini while watching and believe he would be tickled.

Costigan as Lola is particularly fine as someone who knows far more than she's yet had opportunity to say. The exchanges between Lola and Phil are bittersweet because they seem so necessary at this exact place for each of them. Underscoring is O'Reilly's choice of iconography as the two main characters happen to be cosplaying two of the more tragic 20th Century American figures: Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Elvis Presley as Elvis in everything he ever did. The pair think the world of the world. It's apparent even as they fess up to the truth in their individual struggles to make a place in it with best intentions far from home. Look for the Presley classic from which the film draws its title, sung in Gaelic.

Imaginatively conceived by cinematographer Joe Foley, the proceedings are a visual and aural smorgasbord with a breezy, understated flair. (No small trick.) It's an audience's guess where or how Lola and Phil will end up. What is undeniable is what each of them learns on the way. Simply by listening and being heard, their universes expand beyond the consequence of current circumstance.