EXT. – BLOOR STREET, TORONTO – DAY
The shot is of HER HANDSOME NEIGHBOUR (28) from the perspective of a second story apartment window as he walks along Bloor. He’s wearing sunglasses, which he will be seen wearing throughout. He approaches the apartment and enters below.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – DAY
We see MARISSA (24) staring out her bedroom window. Her gaze is mixed with longing and resentment.

INT. – HER HANDSOME NEIGHBOUR’S APARTMENT – DAY
The shots should be all close-ups. There should be very little revealed about his apartment. We can see him packing boxes and stacking them inside his door. In ink, he writes STORAGE across the top of each one.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – DAY
We see Marissa reading a physics textbook, underlining sections of text. She hears a car door slam and simultaneously breaks her pencil.

EXT. – BLOOR STREET, TORONTO – DAY
The shot is of her handsome neighbour and his new FIANCÉE (24) assisting two other men move the remaining articles in from a moving van parked at the curb. We see a shot of the passing cars through her handsome neighbour’s tinted glasses.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – DAY
We see Marissa again standing at her bedroom window staring at her handsome neighbour. The bed beside her is simply a mattress on the floor. We then hear the smoke-alarm buzzing and watch her race in a panic toward the kitchen to retrieve her burning toast. She pulls the toast out, fans the smoke and reaches to take down the alarm still ringing on the living room wall. When she’s through, the silenced alarm still on her lap, she looks down at the floor where we can see a sea of tiny black rectangles surrounding her chair. We see her hand reach into a tray of black markers and grab one. She bends down and traces a new rectangle around the chair’s front left leg and repositions the chair diagonal to the corner. The apartment is startlingly bare, nothing on the walls and hardly a piece of furniture. We can tell from her dress and her movements that the apartment is cool, and slightly uncomfortable.

As she turns the corner to go down the interior stairs to pick up the newspaper delivered outside the door at the bottom, she passes her handsome neighbour and his fiancée just reaching the top of the stairs. He’s turned toward his fiancée, laughing at something he’s just said, and doesn’t notice Marissa who stops to look back at him. She holds her gaze and begins to speak, but stops as they turn the corner.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – DAY
We see Marissa rearranging what little contents she has in her refrigerator and pouring herself a half glass of orange juice. She takes a look at the two horribly burnt pieces of toast and places them on the plate in front of her, and then in the drawer beside her she begins turning any up-side-down cutlery right side up. She does this habitually, without the least of effort, while she glances at the morning paper.

We then see her sitting in the chair in the corner, reading the newspaper. She’s drinking her orange juice and eating her charred toast that crumbles everywhere as she bites it.

Suddenly the rattle of her handsome neighbour’s bed against her wall interrupts her reading. She attempts to continue, but the noise seems to amplify, so she tries to hum to drown out the sound. When this doesn’t work, she moves into her bedroom and reads on her bed, yet the noise seems continually to grow. Finally she goes into her closet, flicks on an interior light, and successfully continues her reading.

When inside the closet she pulls out an object from beneath her. It’s a brown teddy bear that she looks at thoughtfully and sets aside. On the floor beside it, she finds a book inside of which, after flipping through the pages marked in heavy black ink, she finds a handwritten inscription reading the following: “To my daughter on her graduation.”

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – THE NEXT DAY
She wakes up. We see her grab the marker from the tray in the living room to mark off the newly positioned chair, replacing the chair when she’s done. She then goes through the same routine as the day before. When she opens the door to get her newspaper, there’s a box waiting for her that reads “STORAGE” and below “if you wouldn’t mind – your neighbour.” She anxiously picks it up and begins to carry it inside. Then she stops, turns and puts it down again. She stares at it for a moment as though considering her options. We see her return to the box after having gone back inside and with one of her black markers she writes “Sorry” and sets the box in front of her handsome neighbour’s door. After getting back inside her apartment and closing the door, she stops and leans with her back against it. After a moment of rumination she appears to reach a decision and heads back into the main room. We see a shot of the bare walls and the tattered chair in the corner. On a small table beside the chair stand a reading lamp and a photograph of her mother. She sighs in satisfaction as her eyes scan the space before her, but as the camera holds, a look of uncertainty returns. The next shot we see her out in the hall marking on the box again. She’s writing all over the top and eventually along one of the box’s sides in a passion. When she’s through, she slams the cap back on the marker and, with her foot, pushes the box up against her handsome neighbour’s door. After retrieving the newspaper, ascending the inside steps, she stops and stares at the box with its twisting words of black ink, some of which read “How could anyone be so presumptuous? I mean, you won’t even speak to me. Have we ever even spoken two words to one another?” She suddenly grabs it, and we see her place it on her kitchen counter.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – THE NEXT DAY
Again, she wakes up, gets her marker and marks off the tattered chair’s new position, replaces it and finds outside her door another box reading “STORAGE” and below “thanks.”

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – THE NEXT DAY
We see her open the door to find a similar box.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – A WEEK LATER
We see Marissa sitting in her chair reading the newspaper, eating another piece of burnt toast. Then we see her open the door where a nude female mannequin is standing with “STORAGE” written across its belly. Without a hint of hesitation Marissa nonchalantly grabs hold of it and pulls it into the apartment. When she comes into the living room, we see the first shot of the entire room in this scene, cluttered with boxes and miscellaneous goods. She sets the mannequin in a space by the window.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – THAT NIGHT
As Marissa lies in bed, she hears again the rattle of her neighbours. She begins to hum to herself as before, and then stops, and begins to listen. She closes her eyes and we see a flash of images: her walking in unnoticed on her neighbours having sex, standing at their bedroom entrance; a closer angle showing her handsome neighbour astride the mannequin; back out to her still walking from the entrance of their room toward the bed; the closer angle of him astride the mannequin; back out to her walking from the entrance of their bedroom toward the bed; etc. When she reaches the bed, the camera cuts for an instant to her astride the female mannequin, and then to a brief shot of Marissa’s face in the darkness as she comes.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – THE NEXT DAY
Marissa is in the midst of her marking. Her dress seems to hint at her apartment’s continual rise in temperature. She looks around the room, filled with boxes, bins and baskets, yet the mannequin appears to be missing. She walks through the room and into the kitchen and finds it in the foyer by the front door. She grabs it and hauls it into her bedroom, standing it up in front of the window. Outside she notices a man sitting across the street on a bench who appears to be looking up at her. When she realizes it’s her handsome neighbour, she jumps back and leaves the room. From the point of view of her neighbour’s tinted glasses we see the traffic passing along Bloor Street. Then we see an untinted shot of the bare-breasted mannequin in the window.

Marissa heads into the living room, stepping over the mess of boxes, and takes a seat in her tattered chair. When she calms down, she begins to scan the empty walls of her apartment and has an idea.

We see her unloading the piles of boxes, examining the objects sensually as she takes them out. The objects are a pastiche of various junk, mostly of the corporate-America kind. After she empties them out, she begins to use them to decorate her apartment, which becomes smeared with her fetish for the man she hardly knows. The images should be incoherent and garish, a ridiculous over-stimulation of the senses, so by the end of it almost nothing can be distinctly made out.

When she’s finished it’s after dark. For a moment she sits among the objects, invisible within their embrace. The markings on the floor are no longer discernible. Even the walls and the small table beside the chair are completely shrouded. She walks back and stands in the entrance of her bedroom. From the perspective of the bench on the opposing street-side we can see Marissa’s shadow in the dark behind the mannequin who stands in the foreground lit by the streetlights along Bloor.

EXT. – BLOOR ST., TORONTO – THE NEXT DAY
We see her handsome neighbour’s fiancée peck him good-bye and jump on the bus, after which he sits on the bench across from her window again.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – THE SAME DAY
We see a close-up of Marissa’s eyes and then a close-up of the mannequin’s eyes. When the shot pulls back we see that Marissa is staring intently at the mannequin, yet just to the side of the window and out of her neigbour’s possible view. She looks down at its breasts and then down at her own. Suddenly she’s interrupted by the smoke-alarm once again. When she heads into the living room, she doesn’t bother marking the chair’s position, and in the kitchen, with charred toast in hand, she doesn’t bother rearranging the contents of the fridge or the cutlery in the drawer beside her when she gets her orange juice and reaches for her knife to butter her toast.

Marissa then goes into the bedroom and begins to take off her top. She hesitates for a moment next to the mannequin and glances out the window. She can see where her handsome neighbour is sitting and drinking his coffee. She moves a little closer to the window, pulls off her top and begins to fix her hair.
INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – THE NEXT NIGHT
We see Marissa come through her front door carting another box. She comes into the living room, but the mannequin is sitting in her chair. She looks at it for an instant with slight concern and turns toward the kitchen. She sets the box down on the counter and looks ineffectually for something to drink. She then closes the fridge, picks up the box and walks through to her bedroom where her handsome neighbour’s junk now litters the floor along the walls. She looks for a place to deposit the box she’s just brought in, eventually setting it temporarily on the floor as she opens the door of her closet. In a part of the back corner she clears out a space, grasps the box, hesitates for a moment, closes the closet door and sets the box in the space in front of it.

Heading into the living room, beginning to sweat from the apartment’s heat, she reaches for one of her black markers but ends up spilling the entire tray into a heap of objects and doesn’t bother trying to pick them up. Instead she spots a radio among the pile of jetsam. She plugs it in and tries tuning it, but all she can get is static, so she unplugs it and throws it aside. She then heads into her bedroom, only this time leaving the light out. We can see her shadow moving about in the dark. We then see her from the angle of the bench on the street-side where we assume her handsome neighbour must be sitting. She’s moving about the room getting ready for bed. At this point she’s still only a shadow.

Suddenly our view is in the living room from the perspective of sitting in the chair. We look around the room at the scattered objects decorating the walls. They seem now to provide a beauty and warmth of their own. We get up and move slowly through the scattered objects and into the hall.

EXT. – BLOOR ST., TORONTO – CONTINUED THAT NIGHT
We see the tinted view of lights passing along Bloor Street in the night traffic. Nothing is visible but the glare of lights. The view shifts for an instant up toward Marissa’s window, but nothing is visible; all is darkness. The shot does not hold on the window but only shifts past it carelessly and comes back to the passing cars.

INT. – MARISSA’S APARTMENT – CONTINUED THAT NIGHT
We continue along toward Marissa’s bedroom, as though we are walking down the hall in the head of the mannequin, and just before we can see inside, the camera cuts back to the untinted view from the street-side. We can see Marissa’s naked upper body standing statue-still in the Bloor streetlight. The shot cuts back to a tinted view of the racing lights of cars, and then back to the untinted view of the window. Behind her we see the obscured shadow of a human figure in the entrance at her bedroom door. Marissa slowly reaches out and closes the blind.

 

[END]

© 2003 Ryan Turner - Contributor's Bio