Eternal Beauty
Craig Roberts (2019)
In 2010 Craig Roberts played the lead and Sally Hawkins his mother in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine. Roberts is now the writer-director and Hawkins the star of Eternal Beauty but I’ll be surprised if this film repeats the deserved success of Submarine. Hawkins is Jane, fortyish and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. On her wedding day, Jane (played as a youngster by Morfydd Clark) was jilted by her fiancé, Johnny; her stunningly unsympathetic mother Vivian (Penelope Wilton) declared she’d never been so embarrassed in her life. The psychological effect on the bride-to-be was more serious and long-term. Twenty or so years later, Jane lives alone in what’s presumably a council flat. She totters about the estate in a haze of medication. With her light-coloured clothes and white shoes with heels, she might be Miss Havisham’s younger sister.
Jane has two actual sisters – one nice, one nasty. The latter is coarsely glam Nicola (Billie Piper), a single mother with a grown-up, unspeaking daughter called Lucy (Rita Bernard-Shaw). These two are lined up on the sofa, alongside Vivian and her husband Dennis (Robert Pugh), who’s also weirdly reserved, when Jane visits her parents on Christmas Day. Carrying a pile of presents wrapped in shiny gold paper, she explains that these are from her family, for her. Fed up of receiving soap and socks, she’s bought what she really wants – including a handbag that cost £250. When Jane hands her the bill for this, Nicola vehemently tells her where to get off. Jane then goes for Christmas dinner at the home of her nice sister, Alice (Alice Lowe), who’s estranged from their parents and Nicola. The celebrations there are nearly as muted. Alice’s young son Jack (Spencer Deere) is glum because his dog died earlier in the day. Jane is uneasy with the carrots and asks Alice’s husband Tony (Paul Hilton) what he put on them: Tony’s reply is coriander though from his tone of voice it might be strychnine. Soon afterwards, Jane says she has to leave because she doesn’t like coriander. Alice gives her a lift home and Jane tells her, not for the last time, that Tony is having an extramarital affair.
These early scenes suggest a world out of joint. The possibility that it’s the world seen from the heroine’s perspective holds your attention for a while. People suffering from schizophrenia with paranoia can exhibit disorganised behaviour and speech, as Jane certainly does, and have delusions. Some of the main people in her life – her mother, Nicola, Tony – are emphatically (entirely) malignant: or is this just how they seem to Jane? Hers aren’t the only clothes that look stuck in a time warp and the same goes for the décor in her parents’ home. Is this because time stopped for Jane when Johnny didn’t show up at the church? (The film’s title apparently refers to a beauty product, featured in a TV commercial at one point, which promises to transform its users ‘from faceless to ageless’.) Perhaps this is what Craig Roberts means us to think but I gradually lost faith in the idea. Jane is on screen most of the time but not continuously. Unless the bits of the film she’s absent from are her imaginings (and Roberts doesn’t make clear they are), there’s no evident difference between the world she perceives and the world that happens without her.
The vaguely outmoded sets and costumes seem designed just to work up bizarre atmosphere – as if that were naturally appropriate to a story whose protagonist is disturbed. The longer it goes on, the more Eternal Beauty seems driven by antique clichés of mental illness (on the screen): that it equates to outlandish appearance and mannerisms; that it derives from one specific trauma; that an abnormal mind is able to perceive reality beyond the ken of the well-adjusted. Jane’s super-perceptiveness seems to be a mixture of straightforward observation and clairvoyance. She insists Tony has another woman because she’s seen them together. When Alice eventually does, too, she has to accept that Jane is right. (Tony might as well carry a neon sign reading ‘scumbag’ through the film yet his wife is inexplicably unsuspecting.) Jane’s Christmas present to her nephew Jack was an umbrella; this irritated Alice, who said he wouldn’t need it. But Jane knew better. When Alice spots Tony and his bit on the side in his parked car, she leaves her own car and approaches the lovers in pouring rain. Little Jack gallantly follows with his umbrella.
Eternal Beauty is described on Wikipedia as a ‘dark comedy’ (yes, another one). In the early stages, there were a few hopeful titters in NFT2 at Jane’s peculiar behaviour but they soon dried up: this is a film that manages to be disorienting yet dreary. It livens up briefly when Jane, in a doctor’s waiting-room, bumps into old acquaintance and failed musician Mike (David Thewlis). They strike up a friendship and he moves in with her: Sally Hawkins and David Thewlis give their scenes together an odd-couple spark. Nicola, in the meantime, has married a much older man (Tony Leader); when he dies (and who can blame him?), she asks Jane if she can move in temporarily, too. Of course, Nicola soon seduces Mike, which puts an end to Jane’s relationship with him and her short-lived happiness.
This is Craig Roberts’s second feature. In his first, Just Jim (2015), which I’ve not seen, he played the lead as well as writing and directing. Although Roberts’s co-star in Just Jim was Emile Hirsch, he’s got together a higher-powered cast for Eternal Beauty, perhaps as a result of involving Sally Hawkins in the project at an early stage of development. (According to Wikipedia, Hawkins signed up just as The Shape of Water started winning awards.) It’s a pity that Roberts condemns good people like Penelope Wilton and Billie Piper to one-dimensional roles. He also places an unreasonably heavy burden on Hawkins to carry the film. She plays Jane with empathetic and characteristic finesse but the one-woman-show nature of Eternal Beauty eventually overtaxes her eccentric charm.
Another trope of the mental-illness-drama tradition is the curative light-bulb moment. Roberts deploys this, too. Jane imagines talking on the phone to Johnny (voiced by Robert Aramayo), telling him she loves him, hearing him say he loves her, realising he’ll let her down again. She takes a pair of scissors to the telephone wire. Early on, she’s struck by a painting hanging in her doctor’s surgery. It shows a figure in white on a beach; when Jane speaks wistfully about the painting, the doctor (Boyd Clack) burbles something about her becoming the figure in it as her condition improves. In the closing stages of Eternal Beauty, the painting appears all over the place, including Vivian’s bedroom, above her deathbed. In its final appearance in the doctor’s surgery, the figure is wearing a costume of a different, darker (no longer bridal?) colour.
Although Roberts stops short of restoring Jane to pre-wedding day health, her decisive action with the phone wire is the cue for him to start wrapping things up. In a conversation between them near the end, Alice says it’s hard work being normal (though Alice Lowe’s likeable, refreshing normality is, for the audience, anything but) while Jane admits she enjoys the ‘power’ of being the way she is. You could easily miss that last remark, probably the most interesting in the script. Potentially interesting, that is: its implications haven’t been explored. According to Sight & Sound (October 2020), Eternal Beauty was inspired by Craig Roberts’s schizophrenic aunt. Despite that personal connection, her nephew is preoccupied here with using psychological disturbance as a means to the end of stylish strangeness.
21 September 2020