Carlos Marqués-Marcet (2017)
Eva (Oona Chaplin) and Kat (Natalia Tena), a lesbian couple, live together in present-day London, on a canal boat. Kat’s Spanish friend Roger (David Verdaguer) comes to stay. On the first night of his visit, the three of them have plenty to drink and Eva says how much she wants a baby. She asks if Roger would be willing to donate sperm and he says yes. In vino veritas: the morning after, Kat, who’s not interested in parenting, is alarmed to discover that Eva hasn’t forgotten what was said under the influence. As her plan solidifies, Kat appears to accept it; she and Eva break the news to the latter’s New Age-ish mother Germaine (Geraldine Chaplin). Though far from hostile, Germaine is worried the set-up will lead to complications – she harks back to her own experiences of living in a commune in the 1970s. Kat goes into a paroxysm of anti-conformism: she accuses Germaine of knowing, even in her socially radical period, that this wouldn’t last – that she’d end up with a relatively conventional lifestyle. Eva, with Roger’s help, soon becomes pregnant.
Although there’s only one drunken episode in Anchor and Hope, most of the first half is like being in the company of people who are well oiled when you’re not. The in-your-face kookiness is there from the very start, when the two young women bury their late cat in a ceremony over which Germaine presides. Conversations involving Eva and Kat are – in terms of both the words spoken and the speech rhythms – reliably (and self-consciously) zany. Roger does a fair amount of physical clowning around too. There are a couple of kinky details: Kat finds the smell of Eva’s excrement a turn-on; Roger, when he sleeps with a non-white girl (Lara Rossi), says her ‘pussy tastes of chocolate’ and she accuses him – jokily, of course – of racism. Watching the film in the Minema at Curzon Bloomsbury intensified my stone-cold-sober feeling: the small space was nearly full and the people nearest to me, among others, were laughing almost continuously.
Then Eva has a miscarriage and the movie a personality transplant. The unusual ménage and location, the surfeit of wacky talk and behaviour, eccentric songs on the soundtrack – all these suddenly count for little. Anchor and Hope does, in effect, what Kat laid into Germaine for doing, as it settles down into standard ‘thoughtful’ romcom territory. To be fair to the Spanish director Carlos Marqués-Marcet and Jules Nurrish, with whom he wrote the screenplay, there’s a bridge between the two halves that provides the film’s best scene. Roger has taken much more interest than Kat in the pregnancy: he goes with Eva for her first ultrasound and to a poncy shop that sells baby things. There’s a piano on the canal boat; when Eva and Roger sit together at it, the intimacy the actors convey makes you wonder if Eva is veering towards a physical relationship with Roger. Then she tells him quietly that she wants him to go back to Barcelona: if he doesn’t, says Eva, there’s no chance of Kat engaging with the prospect of motherhood.
Once the miscarriage and the change of tone occur (very soon after this scene), the plotting becomes mechanical. Eva, deciding that Kat is relieved by the loss of a baby she never wanted, leaves her and moves in temporarily with Germaine, before finding a flat of her own. Kat and Roger pick up a couple of girls they meet in a pub, one for him (Meghan Treadway), one for her (Charlotte Atkinson), and take them back to the canal boat. But Kat can’t go through with it (once her prospective bedmate uses the toilet). She gets Eva’s new address from Germaine and turns up there, saying she’s desperate to start again and now truly ready for them to try for a baby. When Eva announces she’s already pregnant once more, Kat walks out and Eva watches her disappear. Cut to Kat on the canal boat, with Roger, who’s still keeping her company there. Eva turns up on the towpath and smiles at them. Kat, breaking into an incredulous smile back, asks ‘Are you coming aboard?’ and the answer is yes. The film thus ends happily. It’s far from clear how the renewed relationship can work but time’s up and a happy ending is nicer than a sad one.
Anchor and Hope is named for an actual pub in South East London. The best thing about the film is the absorbing water visuals and shots of the cityscape above the canal, photographed by Dagmar Weaver-Madsen. This is Carlos Marqués-Marcet’s second feature: his first, 10.000 Km (2014), also had Natalia Tena and David Verdaguer in leading roles. I don’t remember seeing Tena before: she has a strong presence but, as Kat, she’s tiresomely self-aware and vocally mannered. It probably doesn’t help that Tena has to deliver dialogue that often sounds effortfully improvised, with occasional interruptions of overwriting (notably in the exchange between Kat and Eva before they split after the miscarriage). The gifted David Verdaguer, so impressive in Summer 1993, is another matter. Even though English isn’t his native language, he shows an intuitive ability here for pointing a line and finding humour in it. Verdaguer even made me laugh a couple of times, almost in spite of myself, at Roger’s antics. The Chaplins, daughter and mother, both do exactly what Marqués-Marcet expects of them, though that’s not always a good thing.
4 October 2018
