Perfect Neighbor
(USA, 96 min.)
Dir. Geeta Gandbhir
Programme: U.S. Documentary Competition (World premiere)
There are always inadvertent connections when watching films at festivals, virtual or otherwise. Certain titles speak together, assuming meaning borrowed from other productions that hold no connection other than a coincidental coalescing of programming slots. Two or more films can connect and allow a viewer to recognize similarities that feel like subtle cues from the zeitgeist and collectively invite larger conclusions about the meaning of what’s being seen, even if these shared elements derive from the proclivities of a programmer, or are simply byproducts of watching too many films at once.
Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help but think of the way that the harrowing bodycam footage used in extraordinary ways in Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka echoes in profound, surreal ways in another battleground, that which we witness in Geeta Gandbhir’s accomplished Perfect Neighbor. Told almost entirely through assembled bodycam footage, it’s an astonishing exercise in montage, and one of the more brilliant archival true crime documentaries ever produced. Intriguingly, as a point of symmetry, v for World Cinema and U.S. docs, respectively.
That Gandbhir comes from an editorial background proves to be no surprise. The multiple Emmy Award winner and Peabody recipient edited Spike Lee’s exceptional post-Katrina doc If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise, and with full credit to Mr. Lee, she and her fellow editors truly made that film sing. Now formally listed at the top of credits, it’s clear that Gandbhir has a unique and powerful eye for non-fiction editorial assembly, taking the disparate elements of evidentiary material and crafting it with the care that matches the calibre of a scripted Hollywood production.
Through cross-cutting, subtle shifts in pacing, and diving through innumerable hours of footage, Gandbhir and her team tell this truly appalling story of a neighbourhood that experiences great tragedy. The central narrative surrounds a single street in Ocala, Florida, a sleepy small town located in the North Central part of the state. There, we meet Susan Lorincz, a white haired white lady who is seen to be often furious about the neighbourhood children, most of whom are Black, encroaching on what she feels to be her private space around her rental apartment. Lorincz calls the police repeatedly to respond to her requests that something be done, demanding that her “private space” be cleared of children. She details, in a somewhat delusional manner, to the officers on the calls her own history of being assaulted. Her manic sense of fear is palpable as she explains in wide-eyed fury the feeling of being disrespected by these youths.
Across the street lives AJ Shantrell, manager at a local McDonald’s and the mother to several rambunctious yet affable children. Along with others in the area, the kids use the vast lawn in front of Lorincz’s building to play games and, frankly, act like kids. The majority of the space is on the property of a welcoming neighbour, yet at Lorincz’s insistence “no trespassing” signs are placed to demarcate the area the kids are meant to stay away from. Minor disagreements between Lorincz and Shantrell move from the throwing of one of these signs to the fatal shooting of the mother, whereupon Lorincz defends her actions under Florida’s generous “stand your ground” laws.
What’s so compelling about the film is how the narrow focus on these micro-local events speaks to enormous questions of the American experience as a whole. Questions of race relations, mental health, freedom from harm and freedom to express, and even the right to bear arms and protect one’s property are all at the fore here. Grand ideas of constitutional and existential importance are captured in these almost oppressively quotidian interactions between police and the residents of this one street. The film conveys a boomerang-like sensation with emotions swinging back and forth. And while the specific situation demands the detailed and nuanced examination that Gandbhir affords it, it’s never the case that it only feels like these incidents are cloistered to this one community.
While Chernov’s film uses bodycams to show the impacts of combat, it’s nearly impossible to see the events detailed here as another kind of warfare as old as any: the disparate perspectives and behaviours of irate neighbours holding onto territory either rationally or irrationally, seeing events through seemingly incommensurate gazes, and leading to inexorable violence as irreconcilable differences turn to something far more sinister. One film focusses on a tiny event within a war of global interest; the other the death of a woman who may otherwise would be erased as another statistical murder in a state where such actions are endemic.
It’s all that more remarkable, then, how Gandbhir reverses the impulse to overtly editorialise or contextualise the events that were captured on the torsos of the police or the surveillance cameras in an interrogation room. The errant chest-level framing that arises from the need for officers to record their interactions gives a mix between journalistic objectivity and voyeurism. Askance comments by the police after interviewing some of the individuals provide a small level of their own reading of the situation, but otherwise we are granted an almost omniscient perspective of what’s taking place.
Given that this is not a fictional tale, there’s a chilling, even dreary feeling of inevitability as we see with police call after police call the escalations of both rhetoric and action, a building sense of dread that when the bullets finally fly, things feel that much more horrible. The result is both emotionally powerful and heartbreaking, not simply for the loss of the single individual, but also for the many calls for de-escalation failed to steer the situation away from this conclusion.
It’s that element of inexorability that’s the most haunting, the feeling that no matter what, given all that neighbourhood, that state and that country represent, the crazy white lady was going to end up shooting her Black neighbour and claim to have done so out of fear for her own life. This is not simply a story of racial injustice, of questions of economic disparity, of the nature of policing and the limitations and benefits of given freedoms. It’s of course all of these grand ideas with one Florida street a microcosm of America.
Perfect Neighbor is a nearly perfect film, one constructed entirely out of found materials that still manage to have a laser-like focus and clear editorial and directorial intent. While the form of using existing footage in ways this subtle and effective isn’t new, Gandbhir’s film joins the likes of Brett Morgen’s masterful June 17th, 1994 as a showcase for this type of filmmaking, which is no small amount of praise. Brilliantly crafted and presented, this remarkable film transcends the tiny neighborhood in which it is set in ways that astonish, while never for a moment forgetting the singular tragedy that forms the heart of the story, the lives of those affected, or the death that’s not doomed to simply be a statistic or a footnote.