“Mainsplained” on DVD. Do You Need Me to Explain It To You?
Middle class professional Sara has just been mansplained how to be better at her job. Numb by the experience, the humiliating moment eats at Sara’s sanity like a nagging drip of a leaky pipe. In fact, drip sounds of a leaky sink invade her mental space as she nonchalantly places a towel and bucket under the constant dribble. When her boyfriend Ryan comes home, his exasperation is triggered by Sara’s acute indifference and he breaks up with her, mansplaining in bullet points the reasons this relationship has failed. Her blank stares send him off only to return later at the behest of his sister to make amends, but when he notices the leak and starts to mansplain and nitpick her solution, even though she called a plumber, the fed-up Sara stabs him in the eye and hides his body in the closet. When the plumber arrives and begins mansplaining and making gross advances, she stabs him as well and hides his body in the closet. Sara descends further into madness as the mansplaining and the dripping continue, and continue, and continue….
Mansplaining. The newly conjoined word, that’s combines man and explaining is defined as a man condescendingly explaining a process or a subject they, themselves, know little about and assume the knowledge extent of the other person is less than their own, was officially added to the U.S. dictionary in March of 2018 during the height of the #MeToo movement. Evan Jones, the man responsible for write and directing the substandard classics “Death Toilet” and its numerous killer commode sequels, is now behind “Mansplained,” a bareboned, indie psychological thriller self-described as Roman Polanski-esque and inspired from a story concept by SRS Cinema’s Ron Bonk who also produces the derogatory pejorative term and wokeness themed film alongside Jacobs’ microbudget production company Anhedenia Films.
One aspect of microbudget is a micro cast. Not only is Evan Jacobs the writer, director, and producer, the filmmaker with 52 directorial projects under his belt since 1995 also dons four different characters mansplaining to Sara, played vacantly by Angelique Flores, to show masculinity similarity as well as to save a little mullah on the production bottom line. Jacobs in multi-roles wouldn’t be so much of an issue if there putting in more variety of persona; instead, Jacobs just puts his own off-camera fundamentals into each role, rehashing the same guy, with the same inflections, with the same gestures, and with the same face and bald head. Perhaps that carbon copy plays into the formula of a faceless man creeping into Sara’s one bedroom apartment to tell her how it is and how it should be. I would like to think that’s how Evan Jacobs conveys this story but without any other real indicator that’s the vehicle we’re supposed to be taking a ride in, we’re still stuck at the curb waiting for our elucidation Uber to arrive. As Sara, a woman internally cracking under ignorant male chauvinism, Flores is given no lines nor direction to do anything but to stay virtually silent with a 1000-yard stare. Even when at a boiling spillage point where stabbing is the only way to mute mansplaining, there’s no fire in Flores’s eyes nor any searing-red anger people sometimes go blind to when up to their eyeballs in fury. Sara stultifies about her apartment, looking out the window, looking the drip under the sink, meandering around the square footage, and this goes on for the allotted runtime. “Mansplained” rounds out the cast with an experienced bunch typecasting themselves as various media talking heads, mostly men in newscasters, vloggers, etc., roles, with Clint Beaver (“Woods Witch”), Erica Dyer (“Macabre Mountain”), Brandon Farmer (“Amityville Apocalypse”), Francis Erdman (“Yule Log”), Paul Bradford (“Amityville Karen”), Rudy Ledbetter (“Night of the Tommyknockers”), and Jeffrey Wolf (“Motorboat”) with Lindy Hartsfield and Erin Hickman providing the telephone voice and physical presence of Michelle in a mixed up of associations with Sara.
To be honest, “Mansplained” is a slog which is more Polanski-lite than Polanski-esque. The channeled madness Sara displays only nibbles the bait of being in the deluge of mansplaining by what is, essentially, the same person in her eyes and even the titular mansplaining comes off slightly feeble, never pushing the condescending boundaries of Sara’s limits and is more repetitive nonsense than patronizing prodding. Without Sara reacting or trying to get a word in edge wise against Evan Jacob’s motor-mouthing salvo, a one-sided approach to a two-person dynamic renders the madness useless and impotent, especially when there are no other devices to support it. Only in the very end does sanity crack open for us to peer into Sara’s disturb nature but even that moment of clarity has its legs cut out from under it, erasing the acrid accumulation of Sara’s stoically murderous, pent-up rage from the past hour in a quickly summed up way of an unexpected twist-like ending. The periodic splice-ins of news reporters, vloggers, podcasters, and the like plant seeds of the philosophical sense around objective and subjective views, posing questions and raising awareness as if speaking to the audience watching the movie rather than to drive the characters in the story. What Jacobs set out to accomplish was woman empowerment over condescending men in an enough-is-enough, kill-the-man way but what results is more the opposite with the heroine cracking under the bombardment of man’s sexist spew, succumbing to a catatonic and deranged state as she’s unable to handle the pressure.
Produced by Ron Bonk, it comes to surprised that the home video rights would fall under Bonk’s SRS Cinema, a safe haven distributor for DIY indies. The DVD is a MPEG2 encoded, standard definition, dual-layered DVD9, plenty of format space for adequate compression outcome as the bitrate maintains an average of 7.7Mbps. Yet, the not as sharp quality stems from commercial grade video equipment that’s jittery, possible motion blur with the handheld and compounded by the slow-motion frame rate for stylistic effect and doesn’t produce finer details in the electronics’ finite capabilities. Aside from some flashbacks and inner thoughts denoted by black and white imagery, “Mansplained” stays the natural color course without any strategic lighting to jazz up the appeal. The English language Dolby Digital 2.0 mono has no complains inside a one location set with no vigorous action. Overlaid telephone and podcast conversation audio, dripping/leak soundbites, and the brooding, discordant string soundtrack clearly come through with in-frame recording being very satisfactory, like ASMR satisfactory, in the minor, around-the-apartment hubbub as well as the dialogue albeit the audibly innate elbowroom echo. There are no subtitles available. Special features include a feature audio commentary with Evan Jacobs going into the genesis of the idea and his explanation for his methods and style choices, a 22-minute making-of featuring interviews with Evan Jacobs, Angelique Flores, and Lindy Hartsfield with crew including cinematographer Mike Hartsfield, “Mansplained” rehearsals that’s chiefly a PJ’ed Evan Jones acting alone in his residence, and the trailer. The standard DVD Amaray case carries no ancillary material with the disc that has the same disc art as the DVD front cover, photoshopped with a maniacal Evan Jacob’s face grinning ear-to-ear between the opening of a chained lock door. The feature has a runtime of 74 minutes, comes not rated, and the SRS DVD has a region free playback. Too much ambiguity on the table and not enough production value trumps the underlying expression as we actually need to be “Mansplained” to fully understand the endgame.
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