Film review

  • The Eternal Daughter

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Joanna Hogg (2022)

    Joanna Hogg makes clear from the start that The Eternal Daughter is a ghost story.  A car, emerging from fog and heading towards the hotel where the film’s action will take place, is almost wraith-like.  The taxi driver informs the younger of his two passengers that the hotel is haunted:  he tells of an unknown figure that unaccountably appeared in a photograph of himself and his wife taken at the location.  There are fragments of eerie-ethereal music on the soundtrack, as well as creaking noises, which keep the main character, Julie, awake on her first night in the remote hotel, somewhere in the Welsh countryside.  Julie is staying there with her mother, Rosalind, whose dog scratches and whines, as if to get to something just outside the door of their room.

    Viewers familiar with Hogg’s work will, also from the start, be sceptical that a haunted house tale dependent on such standard elements is in the offing.  Even if we’ve not read about The Eternal Daughter in advance, those of us with a decent memory for names will recall that the protagonist in Hogg’s previous two films was a Julie and her mother a Rosalind, who owned dogs.  Once it emerges that the new film’s Julie is, like her namesake, a film-maker, we wonder if The Eternal Daughter might be ‘The Souvenir Part III’ in substance if not in name.  In The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021) Tilda Swinton was in the supporting role of Rosalind; her real-life daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, was Julie.  In The Eternal Daughter, Tilda Swinton plays both the mother and the daughter – with masterly economy and emotional precision.

    Late-middle-aged Julie means to kill two birds with one stone in taking elderly, recently widowed Rosalind to the hotel.  The place was once a private house, the family home in which Rosalind grew up:  Julie thinks it will be nice for her mother to celebrate her birthday there.  Julie also means to use the time to work on a screenplay based on and exploring her and Rosalind’s relationship.  In the narrative’s early stages, those spooky tropes combine to compelling effect with a naturalism that, because it’s believable, works on the audience’s nerves as much as on Julie’s.  Her first encounter at the hotel is with a remarkably charmless, grudging receptionist (very well played by Carly-Sophia Davies).  Having been as unhelpful as possible, the receptionist leaves the hotel at the earliest opportunity:  Julie watches her get into her boyfriend’s car, which drives off at speed.  Despite what the receptionist tells Julie about the rooms all being booked, there appear to be no other guests with whom to compare notes.  The place’s Mary Celeste quality is unnerving.

    Over the course of the following day at the hotel, you may start to think differently about what you’re watching.  The receptionist is also the lone waitress in the deserted dining room:  she’s hardly more obliging than on the previous evening but hotel facilities are evidently not as bad as might be expected from her attitude.  Meals are served and Julie has no complaints about them.  It’s hard for her to get a signal when she tries to phone someone later revealed to be her husband but she is able to work on her screenplay without interruptions or technical problems, despite the receptionist’s warning about the unreliable Wi-Fi.  You begin to wonder whether what Julie is experiencing – and what’s on screen always seems to represent her point of view – is objective reality.  Another member of hotel staff appears, the caretaker Bill (Joseph Mydell) – he’s friendly and helpful, the receptionist’s polar opposite.  When Rosalind’s Springer Spaniel, Louis, dashes out into the night and Julie, distraught, searches for him in vain, it’s Bill who lends a hand, though he doesn’t find the dog.  He doesn’t need to:  when Julie returns to her mother, Louis is sitting on Rosalind’s bed, tail wagging, though it’s not clear how he got back in the hotel room.

    The briefly lost dog is an expression, and not the only expression, of Julie’s anxiety.  For her mother’s sake, she desperately wants everything to go right with the stay but she struggles to make that happen from the moment they enter the hotel.  It emerges that some of Rosalind’s youthful memories of the place are painful:  it’s where she suffered a miscarriage and learned of the death of a family member in World War II.  When Julie isn’t in the room with her mother, she seems to hear unsettling remarks about herself from Rosalind, who tells Louis what a ‘fusspot’ Julie is and confides in Bill her regrets that her daughter has never had a child of her own but dotes on Rosalind instead.  Julie’s own conversation with Bill is, however, gravid with implication.  She admits that her screenplay isn’t progressing well:  she says she’s not sure she has the right to write revealingly about her mother.  She tells him that her late father was called Bill, too.  The caretaker is himself recently bereaved:  he tells Julie he’s learning to play the flute, in the hope this will enable a new phase in his and his late wife’s relationship.  This slight suggestion of Orpheus and Eurydice (even if Orpheus’s instrument was a lute!), in conjunction with Julie’s childlessness, reminds us that her bedside reading in the hotel is the 1904 Rudyard Kipling story They – described on the Kipling Society website as ‘a strange haunting story of the limbo of lost children not yet ready to feel at home in Heaven, harking back for a space to the earth and the life they knew there’.

    Julie and Rosalind share humorous moments courtesy of the male relative who lives in the area and invites them to lunch, and whom neither wants to see; but the setbacks continue and culminate in Rosalind’s birthday dinner, which Julie has designed as the high point of their stay.  Her mother stumbles as she enters the dining room.  She opens presents from her daughter but she doesn’t feel like eating.  Julie, in distress, tells her mother she can’t be happy unless Rosalind is happy too.  She hisses at the receptionist-waitress to bring in Rosalind’s birthday cake but not to light the candle, which Julie herself will do.  When it appears with the candle already lit, Julie grabs the cake and approaches the dining room table, singing ‘Happy birthday to you’.  Her mother’s chair on the opposite side of the table is now empty.

    The Eternal Daughter, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022, was also part of the London Film Festival programme last year:  it was on my short list of films to see there but not one of my final choices.  Catching up with it more than a year later, Hogg’s piece now seems to have things in common with a more recent sophisticated ghost story and one of LFF 2023’s offerings – Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers.  Haigh’s film also focuses on a screenwriter trying to write a script about his family past; involves scenes between him and his parents, who are dead but very present in his regretful memories.  Julie’s mother’s vanishing is The Eternal Daughter‘s big reveal and not much happens subsequently – although Tilda Swinton’s deathbed Rosalind is a potent image.  As Julie prepares to leave the hotel, it’s suddenly swarming with guests.  The receptionist voices kindly concern about Julie’s mental health before Bill sees her into her taxi.  It’s a clear day – no sign of fog – as the taxi drives away.  Joanna Hogg’s themes – the creative moral dilemma of a writer mining their own past and the past of those close to them, the persistence of people we’ve loved and lost – finally seem less than original.  But The Eternal Daughter makes satisfying sense in retrospect and it’s beautifully made and played.

    10 December 2023

  • Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sophie Hyde (2022)

    I chickened out of Sophie Hyde’s sex dramedy at the cinema last year because of its star.  In her public statements and appearances Emma Thompson gives the impression of almost indecent self-confidence:  the prospect of watching her pretend to be someone desperately inhibited – and of an audience audibly lapping this up – was intimidating.  I caught up with Good Luck to You, Leo Grande in the privacy of BFI Player.

    Thompson’s character, Nancy Stokes, is about sixty – a mother of two, a widow, now retired from teaching religious studies in a secondary school.  Nancy Stokes isn’t her real name:  it’s the one she uses to book a hotel room for the afternoon, there to meet with a male sex worker half her age – Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack).  That turns out not to be his real name either but Leo is more comfortable with his line of work than Nancy is about paying for his services.  On this first meeting with him, she’s a whirlwind of tense dither; not much physical happens between them.  But Leo, contrastingly relaxed, is sympathetic to Nancy’s self-reproachful anxiety and encourages her to talk about herself.  She reveals she’s never had an orgasm in her life although she faked them throughout her thirty-one-year marriage.  She’s never had oral sex either; her late husband, the only sexual partner she ever had, considered that demeaning.  For his part, Leo tells Nancy that he finds his line of work often interesting, sometimes rewarding and not at all demeaning – despite this particular client’s seeming to think he should.  Leo does admit that he hasn’t told his mother what his job is:  she thinks he works on an oil rig.  That makes Nancy laugh, briefly but almost hysterically.

    She books another session with Leo in the same room, a week later.  Those last two phrases suggest a play text and Leo Grande often seems to belong in a theatre rather than on a cinema screen.  Until early in its last act, the piece is a two-hander; until an even later point, it’s nearly all talk.  Nancy’s fears of letting herself go are a pretext for that but the film’s lack of visual life, even within the limits of its nearly one-set location, is a problem.  (We first see Leo emerging from a café onto the street; there’s a longer sequence in the café of the hotel where he and Nancy meet; otherwise it’s all the booked room.)  This is the third feature from Australian film-maker Sophie Hyde; although she directs very capably Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack (in his first lead role in cinema), Hyde frames the action unimaginatively.  There’s no sense of claustrophobia or security or anything else much in the hotel room.  Even its impersonality barely registers.

    This is a first screenplay by the British comedy writer and performer Katy Brand.  She shows a good ear for dialogue and supplies some funny, insightful moments but the script as a whole is unsatisfying.  Brand presumably wanted to explore a self-doubting, frustrated, late-middle-aged woman rather than a fit young man who makes his living selling sexual services; she obviously recognised that wasn’t enough material for a feature-length script.  The fundamental imbalance of her interest in the two characters always shows, though.  For the first half of the film, Leo is a virtual fantasy figure – handsome, courteous, sensitive, funny.  Later on, Brand tries to give him substance by revealing that he’s not only estranged from his brother but was disowned by his mother when he was fifteen (when she caught him and his friends engaging in group sex).  Between their second and third sessions, Nancy does some online research to discover Leo’s real name (Connor – but I’ll stick with Leo).  At the third session, after he has performed oral sex on her, she asks if they can be friends and offers to speak with his mother to bring about reconciliation.  These things express not credible facets of Nancy’s personality but Katy Brand’s sense of obligation to give Leo backstory – because that’s what you do in a two-character study.  Nancy’s inhibitions aren’t the only straitjacket at work here.

    Brand’s comedy writing is more anchored in character – Nancy’s character, that is – although some bits work better than others.  It’s amusing that congenitally well-organised Nancy arrives for the second session armed with a checklist of sexual experiments (which they are to her) to work through.  It’s a lame idea that attempts to get going on this agenda – item one, fellatio – are repeatedly thwarted by Nancy’s answering calls on her mobile from her crisis-prone daughter.  (She doesn’t much like either of her children:  she admits, guiltily but more than once, to finding her son boring.)

    Angered by Nancy’s intrusion in his personal life, Leo storms out of their third session and it’s surprising that he agrees to a fourth.  In the clumsy prelude to this, while Nancy waits for him in the deserted hotel café, the cast more than doubles:  Nancy is plagued by a trio of waitresses (Charlotte Ware, Carina Lopes, Isabella Laughland).  The last of these, Becky (Laughland), recognises Nancy as her former RE teacher, Mrs Robinson – a knowing nod to the gulf between this older woman and her namesake in The Graduate.  Once Leo arrives, Nancy starts explaining things to him at a rate of knots:  her real forename is Susan (I will use that from now on); he has awoken her sexually; she has recommended him to friends.  Becky chips in with a recollection of how Mrs Robinson once branded her and her schoolmates ‘sluts’ because of their short skirts.  Susan, after apologising for this, recommends Leo’s services to Becky, too.

    After more than an hour of discretion that verges on pussyfooting, Leo Grande bursts into a finale as candid as it’s energetic.  This is meant, of course, to reflect the transformation that Leo has wrought in Susan – and there are plenty of sex acts still to get through on her list in what both know will be their last session together.  Even so – and even though Sophie Hyde is Australian and Daryl McCormack Irish – the whiff of no-sex-please-we’re-British that hangs round most of the film makes its eventual, abrupt change of gear feel more like loss of control than liberation.  Given the set-up, it’s as inevitable that Susan will finally have her first orgasm as it was that Margaret in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023) would get her first period.  The orgasm arrives as Susan pleasures herself watching Leo, as he searches for a sex toy, stroll nude around the room.  He then gets dressed, they shake hands and Susan speaks the farewell words that give the film its title.

    Daryl McCormack may not be a great actor (he was nothing special as the detective in the dreary mystery drama The Women in the Wall on television earlier this year) but he’s likeable and, within the limits of his role, very effective in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.  Emma Thompson, when she expresses Nancy-Susan’s thoughts and feelings through her face and body, comes up with some of the best acting I’ve seen from her.  This culminates in the very last scene when, after Leo’s departure, Susan stands naked at a full-length mirror to appraise – and eventually approve of – her ageing body.  The idea is pat but Thompson’s nerve and the light in her eyes elevate the moment.  When she speaks (and she speaks a lot), she tends to be relatively artificial, although she shows some expert timing – and knows when to throw away Katy Brand’s more comically emphatic one-liners.

    5 December 2023

Posts navigation