In the quirky independent film Cherish, house arrest never seemed so sexy.
The film revolves around the travails of Zoe (Robin Tunney), a hapless, love-starved young woman who finds herself wrongly accused of a crime and sentenced to spend her days confined to her apartment and tracked by an ankle bracelet.
While she tries to figure out how to prove her innocence, she climbs the walls in boredom–especially sexual boredom. Stripped of virtually all outside contact save for the uptight police technician who monitors her ankle bracelet, Daly (Tim Blake Nelson), and the amourous neighbors she spies on, Zoe soon finds herself both having and being the object of several steamy fantasies. All this to a soundtrack of airy ’80s pop songs that, when placed in a thriller-ish context, take on a disturbingly sinister bent.
“We all have fantasies, but we rarely share them with each other. Like, I’m not going to tell you the fantasy I was having this morning,” says writer/director Finn Taylor. “I wanted to go into the minds not just of the lead character but all the characters and explore the fantasies they were having.”
Taylor, who created the equally offbeat 1997 indie Dream With the Fishes, incorporated real-life stories from people on the ankle bracelet program into this off-kilter mélange of thriller and romantic comedy. “Being the human animals we are, they would try to find ways around it, either literally or psychologically,” he says.
“I’ve never read anything quite like it,” offers Tunney, who successfully won the eccentric lead role of Zoe over bigger-name actresses by deluging Taylor with reasons why she was perfect and promises to do whatever it took–even flying coach on her own dime (!)–to make the film.
As Taylor tells it, he didn’t need as much convincing as the actress suggests. He was willing to pass on names with more box office clout, especially after seeing Tunney’s highly praised performance in the film Niagara, Niagara, which he says demonstrated “her willingness to give into a role even if it looked grotesque at times.”
“There were bigger-name actresses who wanted to play the role…Robin’s an established actress with a slightly fresher face,” he says. “She’s obviously a very naturally beautiful woman, but she’s willing to look not beautiful.”
Despite starring roles in big-budget efforts like End of Days and Vertical Limit and artier fare like Niagara, Niagara, the actress is still best recognized by fans for her 1996 film The Craft–which she attributes to its zillion airings on cable.
“I can usually tell by how somebody’s dressed when they come up what they’ve seen,” she says. “If it’s a cop, it’s the Schwarzenegger movie for sure. If it’s somebody who’s outdoorsy, it’s Vertical Limit. Somebody who looks uber-artistic, it’s Niagara. And everybody else, The Craft.”
Although she won Taylor’s faith, Tunney says that once she got on the set, her own confidence level was a little shaky–especially given that she’s in almost every scene. “I was terrified, paranoid and worried. I thought, ‘God, I’m going to ruin this guy’s movie. If it’s not good, it’s my fault.'”
She was further thrown by Taylor’s loose, on-the-gun style of shooting, especially when the director called on her to shoot a series of sexy scenes that didn’t appear in the original script on the first day of production. Tunney said Taylor told her he got a yacht for the sequence she’d never heard of and said, “Put on a bikini, we’re getting in the car.”
“I just thought, OK, this guy’s either a Northern California freak, or he’s got some vision. I mean, I spank myself in the film,” says the actress, giggling. “I didn’t know if it was the last film I was ever gonna do!”
As the repressed Daly, Zoe’s prospective paramour whose fantasies parallel hers to a lesser degree, Taylor found character actor Nelson, who had recently arrived on audiences’ radar as the bluegrass-singing convict Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou?.
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Nelson calls his character “someone as close to myself as I’ve ever been asked to do…I’m kind of an odd-looking guy and I’m short, so…any director who’s going to put me in the role that gets to kiss the girl is a director I want to [work with].”
Tunney gives an equal amount of credit for the film’s development to her co-star. “Every idea that he came to the table with completely changed the film, I think in a better way.”
In fact, Taylor was open to ideas from both of his stars. “There was a scene Robin suggested with asking [Tim] to sit on the couch next to her,” says Taylor. “That became a hot moment in the movie. When we’re pushing in with him and I cranked up the Hall & Oates–it was just such a hilarious scene.”
Speaking of the mulleted duo known for their barrage of ’80s pop hits such as “She’s Gone” and “Private Eyes” (both of which appear in the film), Cherish is rife with ironic uses of such pop confections from the Greed Decade as Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love,” Modern English’s “I Melt With You” and the Human League’s “Fascination.” It also uses older, equally light tunes like the Turtles’ “Happy Together” and the Association’s “Cherish” to surprisingly dark effect.
“I was driving in a real rural area and I could only get the radio station that was playing ‘The Best Love Songs of All Time All the Time,'” remarks Taylor of the origin of the pop music backdrop. “And the lyrics were these poppy, happy tunes but some of the lyrics were like, ‘Private eyes/they’re watching you…’ or in ‘Cherish’: ‘If I could hold you like a thousand other guys and mold you into someone who would love me…’ They were kind of scary and obsessive, and I just found it funny.”
“It was like a character in the film,” says Tunney of the music. “We would sit around and say, ‘Oh my god–That one! Oh, oh, remember that one?’ I think that ‘Seasons in the Sun’ is a really creepy song in the movie.”
“Finn’s use of music in this movie is just delightful, it’s so smart,” enthuses Nelson. “People like the characters in this movie do have inner monologues fueled by the bromides contained in shallow pop songs.”
Confesses the actor, whose bluegrass singing appeared on the O Brother soundtrack, “I avoided that sort of music when I was growing up. I listened to alternative music and reggae and jazz and also country music. But I never really listened to Hall & Oates, and I worked in a record store!”
