Dir: Jonathan Glazer
Billed variously as a science-fiction film, a horror film, an abduction film, a road movie and a chance to see Scarlett Johansen nude or in lingerie with other naked woman. If there is anything in this list which catches your interest, I beg you not to spoil it by watching this film. This is a science film so slow it makes The Man Who Feel To Earth seem like a roller-coaster ride, an abduction film that makes Starman seem like a literary masterpiece, a horror film so medically repulsive it makes Hostel or Saw seem like a little light S&M, a road movie so incomprehensible it makes Performance seem like tightly scripted thriller made completely without the use of hallucogenic drugs. Scarlett’s character is an alien (if we were given a name, my brain seems to have forgotten it in self-defence) which drives around a lot in a white van and picks up a succession of social misfits for some weird sexually ambivalent ritual which appears to make their skin come off. But this is no Silence Of The Lambs, where sexual titillation and genuine sadistic nastiness made us feel unclean in our fascination. Here we feel little or nothing as we watch. Only the screeching soundtrack gives any clue that the experience is meant to be unpleasant.
The synopsis read like the plot of Species VI and the idea of replacing Natascha Henstridge with Scarlett Johanssen would indeed fuel many a schoolboy’s daydreams. Certainly her role as an alien seductress should be the stuff of fantasy but she seems so bored and totally sexless with trappings of seduction fitting her character as well as the trowelled-on red lipstick mismatched with the rest of her lacklustre wardrobe. The one scene with any human emotion for the viewer, where she picks up and seduces a junior John Merrick (an elephantiasis victim played beautifully by a talented actor that even imdb can’t help me identify!) was full of pathos for the loneliness of disfiguring diseases and how such an end might be a blissful release. it also featured the films only joke, “I only wanted to go shopping at Tesco’s” but then incomprehensibly, this character survives and is seen making his naked flight like a maniacal streaker across a desolate moorland as if his purity of spirit must have saved him (there was certain no physical mechanism shown by which he makes good his escape).
The BFI had threatened to make a much better job of allocating reduced amounts of Lottery Money to films once the Olympics had taken its gargantuan bite out of it, but they have fallen at the first hurdle. Whilst it may not have the self-flagellationist tone of Hunger where a Turner prize-winner (black Steve McQueen not the white movie star) tried to make us all feel guilty for our heinous crime of locking up potential terrorists when there was no other way to protect society, nor the sickening nostalgia of Nowhere Man as an ageing stills photographer (Sam Taylor-Wood) dug up the corpse of John Lennon one more time for us to fawn over and proving she had no grasp of drama but loads of fecundity as she got knocked up by the male lead (the left-leaning UKFC really knew how to rub their excesses in the faces of struggling film makers with a real story to tell but no political agenda to sell it with), this is every bit as crap as The Sex Lives Of The Potato Men but tries to hide it behind “art” and “ambience.”
Indeed I can only assume that “Art” is the only reason for large chunks of the film to be presented in Black and White (which costs more in post these days as colour footage has to be monochromed). Indeed, the Silver Nitrate tones of the opening scene (after 10 minutes of nothing identifiable) where a nude Johannssen strips a dead girl before performing her bizarre ritual had the vague titillation of a Helmut Newton picture for a teenage boy when he really needs a Penthouse lesbian pictorial in full technicolor. The removal of colour in this film seems to merely mirror the removal of any human aspect of the central character. Where there is colour, it is overrich and provides not the sensuality or richness the film so desperately needs but makes it look more like a bad early 70s episode of Top Of The Pops where the vision mixer had a box of tricks just arrived from Quantel that he wasn’t sure what to do with.
FilmScotland have managed to provide the bleakest, mostly urban and decayed industrial landscapes which should have people crossing Scotland off their holiday lists in droves, so uninviting do both town and countryside look. The exec there who signed off on their participation ought to have resigned by lunchtime (but being a public servant will no doubt brazen it out as the Scottish tourist industry expires overnight).
Still we have had value for money in one area at least. Scarlett’s English accent is as flawless as it was in her breakthrough movie Girl With A Pearl Earring (also made with British public money) and the naturalness of her delivery shows up the supposed brilliance of Meryl Streep in this department (see French Lieutenant’s Woman or Iron Lady) as ham comedic parody, but just as there was no reason for a Dutch servant girl to speak like that, why would an alien speak like that unless only the BBC World Service from 1950 reaches their planet? And if the long periods of silence from Scarlett in ‘Pearl Earring’ spoke volumes, the same sparseness of script from her in this film reveals only vacuousness. Still, it is good to know that whenever we need to hear some proper English spoken by a foreigner on the big screen, we only need to have the BFI fling huge piles of cash at Scarlett’s shapely figure and a bored alumna from Badmington or Rodean can be flawlessly recreated doing very little for a few million quid. What a bargain!
I fell asleep at one point, snored loudly and was congratulated by those around me. The end of the film was greeted with hissing, whistling (very Italian) and booing. Scarlett desperately tried to distract us at the premiere with a strapless number which threatened a wardrobe malfunction every time she took a bow but in the end, even the prospect of a full reveal of “the sensation of two hemispheres” could not in any way reimburse the two hours of our lives which this movie stole. Remind me to rent Species VI next week to wash the taste of this movie away!
