The story focuses on Michael Stone, an author of motivational books on the subject of customer service, as he struggles with his inability to connect to people. One night, while on a routine business trip to Cincinnati, Stone voiced by David Thewlis, checks into Fregoli Hotel and checks out of his normal boring routine life that has begun to seem unreal.
Stone is British and lives with his wife and son in Los Angeles. He travels constantly around America giving lectures about customer services titled How May I Help You Help Them? While focused on motivating employees in the services industry to behave in smiling and ingratiating ways when interacting with customers we see Stone’s irritation when he encounters such people in his travels in hotels, planes and other places with Kaufman’s trademark dark humour.
But Stone enters another dimension when he checks into Fregoli Hotel. “Fregoli delusion” is a paranoid disorder in which the sufferer believes that different people are instead one single person out to persecute them, who assumes various appearances.Stone encounters different characters played by a series of different puppets but they all sound the same and are all voiced by Tom Noonan in a flat and monotonous voice.
Stone despite his obvious success in his career is a desperate and lonely character. He is thinking of divorcing his wife and when he gets to Cincinnati he decides to call up a former girlfriend of 11 years ago, Bella Amarossi who he dumped 11 years ago. But Bella is still carrying her damaged feelings from 11 years ago and the encounter does not go well and Bella also sounds like Noonon.
Things change when Stone meets Lisa voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh who is the only puppet character who sounds different to Stone. The encounter cannot last but while it does Lisa is the only woman in the world for Stone.
This project had a unique genesis and it is something of a minor miracle that it ever made it to the big screen at all.
The story was originally created at composer Carter Burwell’s Theatre of the New Ear as an experimental sound-play. Kaufman wrote the sound play under the pseudonym Franco Fregoli. When the producers decided to make it into a stop motion animation film they launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund it.
Kaufman already has a cinema cult following for his earlier works Being John Malkovich and Synecdoch, New York. Teaming up with co-director Duke Johnson a stop-motion specialist who has had several previous hits to his name a unique collaboration was formed.
While this is a puppet film it is definitely not for children with puppets going to the loo, masturbating and having rather graphic sex. What the due have been able to achieve with the emotions expressed by these masked puppets is amazing and the audience finds itself emphasizing with Stone’s plight and also our own universal plight in a disconnected world.
Credits:
Anomalisa (USA)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson
Cast: Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Thewlis, Tom Noonan
