American Beauty | Collins Street, Woodland Hills — "I Will Sell This House Today"

Two houses on the 22400 block of Collins Street in Woodland Hills carry the film's most efficient piece of cruelty. Number 22421 is the listing Carolyn Burnham cannot sell. Across the street, 22430 is the one Buddy Kane shows with no apparent effort at all.

The sequence is four minutes long and it explains her entire character. She arrives early, opens the windows, scrubs the sliding door on her knees in a good suit, and repeats the mantra: I will sell this house today. Then the buyers come through and lie politely — the pool is not a lagoon, the kitchen smells wrong — and after the last one leaves she pulls the blinds and hits herself and tells herself to stop it. Then she straightens and walks out with the face back on.

Collins Street is ordinary west Valley residential: single-storey ranch houses, wide driveways, oleanders, heat. Woodland Hills regularly runs the hottest temperatures in Los Angeles County, and the scene was shot in exactly that light — flat, white, unsparing.

Drive it slowly and you will see two houses that look almost identical, and there is the point. Nothing about the property was ever the problem. Carolyn is selling herself, and the market is not buying.

Photo: Southern California residential street (Pexels, free licence) — illustrative of the Woodland Hills neighbourhood; both houses are private homes.