THE FALLING - LFF14 - Day Four

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

THE FALLING is a bad film. Badly conceived. Badly acted. A movie that we laugh at rather than laugh with, and that we shouldn't be laughing at or with at all.   It never recovers from the early exit of its most charismatic actress and the conceit of a Crucible-style fit of teenage hysteria is so risibly executed that it becomes absurd but in a bad way. The fiftieth time a girl fainted I said "fuck it" and was sorely tempted to walk out.

So what's the story? It's 1960s England and in a girl's school Lydia (Maisie Williams) is transfixed by her more glamorous and dangerous best friend Abbie (Florence Pugh).  This borderline erotic longing for notice manifests as jealousy as Abbie sleeps with Lydia's brother, and receives the notice of Lydia's agoraphobic mother (Maxine Peake).  Act One of the play sees us experience the raw charisma (and it has to be said superbly naturalistic performance by the actress) of Abbie and when she leaves the film never quite recovers from the whole that she creates.  Moreover, the film lurches from tense psychosexual coming-of-age drama into an attempt at a kind of creepy noir horror as schoolgirls start fainting and having seizures. Is it faked? Is it hysteria? Is there something supernatural going on, as hinted out by the white magic interests of Lydia's brother.  To be frank, after yet another absurdly staged scene of fainting fits in the school hall I really didn't care.

I suspect that what the director Carol Morley (DREAMS OF A LIFE) was trying to go for was a kind of repressed emotions transmitted through acting out culminating in an explosion and epiphany at the end.  If so, the casting is wrong.  Where Florence Pugh is natural and entrancing and Maxine Peake is subtle, traumatised and deeply moving, Maisie Williams acts in a manner that is just altogether too big. I wonder if this is a consequence of her GAME OF THRONES experience where the kind of massive scale epic fantasy requires a kind of larger-than-life performance. At any rate, the director's job is to curb any performances that unbalance the rest of the piece.

Overall, not a great film and a great disappointment after the deeply moving and important DREAMS OF A LIFE.  

THE FALLING has a running time of 102 minutes. The movie does not yet have a commercial release date.

Random DVD round-up 1 - LEAVING

Kristin Scott Thomas has a cool hard beauty that has seen her cast in many a film as, well, a cool hard beauty - emotionally repressed and stolidly dutiful. How wonderful then to see her madly, wide-smilingly in love - almost fey.

In Catherine Corsini's LEAVING, Scott Thomas plays Suzanne, a middle-aged middle-class woman married to a financially successful medic and living in a beautiful house. She is rather taken for granted by her husband (Yvan Attal) and kids, and is trying to reclaim her career as a physiotherapist. She is, in many ways, wandering through life on auto-pilot with occasional outbursts where the rage erupts - as in the powerful opening scene. Suzanne's life changes when she meets and pursues a Spanish builder called Ivan (Sergi López). Their attraction is physical - for sure - but not as singularly as her husband tries to portray it. She isn't just a middle-aged woman who has discovered sex but rather, as in Lady Chatterly's Lover - a kind of freedom and self-knowledge. The second half of the film sees the erotic character study move into a sort of procedural thriller as the two lovers are forced to live cut off from the husband's money and Suzanne's children. The surprise is that it isn't Ivan who drives the narrative - neither as seducer nor as breadwinner. Pretty soon Suzanne's girlie happiness turns into a more brutal, steely survival instinct.

By putting Suzanne firmly at the centre of the film, writers Catherine Corsini and Gaëlle Macé have given Kristin Scott Thomnas a role of the kind that is rarely seen in cinema. A middle-aged woman is allowed to be multi-faceted and the driving force of the action and emotional content of the film. Scott Thomas is completely up to the task and this is further evidence of an actress at the top of her game. I also appreciate that Corsini doesn't feel the need to spin this movie out beyond a 80 minute run-time. Too many films nowadays are unnecessarily baggy. But, there is a big problem with this film - and that's the final act. The closing action is too predictable, too crude relative to what has come before, and the final scenes over the end credits, while presumably trying to be ambiguous seem rather off-tone.

LEAVING played London and Toronto 2009 and was released last year in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Brazil. It was released earlier this year in Germany, Italy, Portugal, the UK, Argentina, Denmark, Sweden and the US.