In Your Hands (15) 81 mins **
Swandown (12A) 93 mins ***
With 2008’s slowburning I’ve Loved You So Long and 2010’s spiky Leaving, Kristin Scott Thomas was appointed high queen of summer
counterprogramming, a one-woman alternative to superheroes. The crown certainly
fits: the actress’s translucent skin makes the ideal carapace for a refined,
restrained performance style that prioritises deeply-held, semi-concealed
thoughts and feelings over bold shows of action. The po-faced In Your Hands, an odd coupling of
captivity horror and relationship drama, depends more than most on this
vulnerability: Scott Thomas plays Anna, a nervy doctor who walks into a
Parisian gendarmerie and begins to
describe her kidnap by a wild-eyed, wild-haired loon (Pio Marmaï) with a grudge.
As the heroine’s ordeal is revealed in
flashbacks, Lola Doillon’s film shrinks to the dimensions of a theatrical huis clos. Captor humiliates captive,
she responds with tenderness, the pair come to co-exist, and we’re shuffled
towards the dangerous insinuation that a singleton like Anna might just be glad
of the attention. Scott Thomas has a real challenge on her hands here – to show
an ostensibly rational woman striving to normalise aberrant behaviour – and
while she resists the set-up’s more lurid possibilities, she can’t make it grip
dramatically in the way those earlier vehicles did. Concluding limply after 81
minutes, In Your Hands feels less
like a credible narrative than a writer-director tentatively playing out her
domination fantasies: Fifty Shades of
Grey may have more to answer for than we thought.
The counterprogramming keeps on coming.
The art-film hybrid Swandown offers
the divertingly bizarre prospect of filmmaker/artist Andrew Kötting (besuited, when
not shirtless) and writer Iain Sinclair (wrapped up warm in waterproofs and
thinking cap) liberating a swan-shaped pedalo from the Hastings seafront and
piloting it inland towards the Olympic site. From the riverbank, the camera
looks on, awed, amused, attuned to the changing scenery, while the soundscape
ebbs and flows with the tides, free-associating songs, stray Sinclairisms, the
Shipping Forecast, scraps of old Albion. A Trigger
Happy TV sketch with extended footnotes, it requires a level of indulgence
– certain stretches of this route are more engaged and engaging than others –
but it’s almost unimprovably English in its mix of cheeky larks, muted protest
and melancholy, and provocative enough to suggest future ventures in a similar
vein. Something with Alain de Botton on the dodgems at Blackpool, perhaps? Gilbert and George Do Crazy Golf?
In Your Hands and Swandown are on selected release.
No comments:
Post a Comment