Concussion (15 cert, 96 mins) ***
The prize for the week’s most arresting premise
goes to Stacie Passon’s Concussion,
an admirably curious indie that initially appears to have the set-up of some
sniggering high-concept comedy. Heroine Abby (Robin Weigert) is a
fortysomething gay woman whose long-term relationship is settling into dull
routine when, one afternoon, she’s struck on the noggin by a wayward baseball
pitched by her son. Within weeks, she’s buying a swanky Manhattan pad on a whim
and hooking up with girls off Craigslist; within a month, she herself is
offering sex for cash. Evidently, she’s all shook up; the question remains
whether this sudden, insatiable appetite for independence is just a phase, or
the way things were always meant to be.
The physics actually aren’t so far-fetched: anybody
who’s ever gone flying over a discarded rollerskate would surely have been
given pause to reconsider having had kids in the first place. And in Weigert,
previously Calamity Jane on TV’s Deadwood,
Passon has an especially persuasive frontwoman: negotiating even this
character’s more extreme urges with a bemused good humour, she makes Abby’s
choice to branch out into sex work seem unexpectedly empowered – for one, it
permits her to share her burgeoning passions with nervy virgins, closeted
housewives and scarred survivors alike. Women’s lib, we gather, can come in
many forms, and from unexpected directions.
You could bracket Concussion off as a chichi update of the New Queer Cinema that
jostled to prominence in the early 1990s: Abby’s glossily well-appointed
lovenest fuels the fantasy of escape as much as anything here. Yet sharp
writing and playing ensure its fingers are never too far from some messy,
universal truth about desire: its heroine could stand for anyone confused as to
what they really want from life, and even straight male viewers might find
something instructive in the discreetly sexy love scenes, object lessons in how
to look at, talk to and touch a woman. A too-neat finale ensures it isn’t quite
a knockout, but Passon’s film arcs into view as a beguilingly flighted
curveball – and, as its protagonist’s progress attests, the occasional one of
those keeps everybody on their toes.
Concussion opens in selected cinemas from today.
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