Here’s something straight out of left field: a surrealist critique and freaky satirical nightmare on the subject of feminism, female body image and social media, with something of Lewis Carroll, Terry Gilliam and maybe a little of Clio Barnard in its subversive use of lip-sync.
We are plunged into a disturbing virtual reality world, or maybe an online gaming arena full of migraine-inducing colours, where a number of women are dressed like robotic Barbie dolls or Stepford Wives, with names like Siri and Alexa, responding to commands and presided over by a deeply weird and disapprovingly haughty madame, who speaks only in dubbed phrases cut up and mashed up from, of all people, Kenneth Clark, presenter of the high-minded and unashamedly western-oriented TV classic from the 60s, Civilisation.
As Clark descants on the subject of the idealised female form in great art and sculpture, these pouting soft-porn figures undermine his airy patrician aphorisms. Later they will eerily parrot all sorts of other voices: Margaret Thatcher echoes distantly.
It could be that Make Me Up is the distended version of a short film, but it is genuinely very strange – and refreshing to find something without the reassuring form of a story or even the obvious form of anything at all.
“What’s not prohibited must be made compulsory!” declaims the Kenneth Clark madame, quoting British author TH White, and this is like a surrealist manifesto. Anything goes. It is a disquieting sugar overload.
