Buster’s Bedroom 1991

A dreamy-eyed young woman, Micha, Amanda Ooms, is determined to immerse herself in the life and work of her idol, the legendary comic actor Buster Keaton. She travels to Santa Barbara and ends up at Nirvana House, a sprawling, largely abandoned villa where a curious menagerie of residents seem to exist outside ordinary time.

Nirvana House is a place steeped in memory: Keaton himself once wandered those halls during his battles with alcohol, even being detained in a straitjacket within the villa. Micha finds her own history echoing his as she, too, is restrained in a straitjacket before somehow slipping free.

Inside the house, Micha encounters Dr. O’Connor, Donald Sutherland, the head of the operation who harbors a fascination with poisonous snakes and a troubling calm. She also meets a bitter, scotch-drinking ex-actress, Diana Daniels, Geraldine Chaplin, who moves through a wheelchair-workspace shaped by psychosomatic ailment, giving an air of fragility that masks sharper edges.

Also among the residents is Warlock, David Warrilow, an asexual beekeeper who seems entranced by the act of pollination, a quiet oddity amid the cacophony of the place. There are others—a crazed pianist and a sailor-obsessed middle-aged gardener—who fill Nirvana House with a strange, almost pastoral rhythm.

Another central figure is Serafina Tannenbaum, Valentina Cortese, a former prima donna who keeps butterflies in her icebox and often drifts toward the Pavilion of Love, a secluded corner where dramatic scenes of a triumphant return from war—like those featuring the Legionnaire, Joe, Martin Wuttke—are performed. The two share a volatile, alluring dynamic: they sleep together, then Serafina questions Joe’s bravery in the morning, doubting the deeds of those who died in battle and even pulling a trigger in a symbolic gesture.

As the line between fantasy and reality blurs, Nirvana House teeters on the edge of danger. Jealousies flare, especially when Diana grows more possessive of Micha’s bond with Dr. O’Connor, turning the already fragile sanctuary into a pressure cooker where old wounds and new obsessions threaten to explode into something unsettlingly real.