Joanna Hogg (2013)
I wasn’t intending to see Exhibition. Joanna Hogg’s first feature Unrelated (2007) passed me by and repeated viewings of the trailer for Archipelago (2010) were enough to put me off sitting through it. The trailer for Exhibition had a similarly irritating effect but Hogg is a writer-director who’s receiving plenty of praise and attention and, since you shouldn’t judge a film by its trailer, I decided to watch Exhibition on Curzon Home Cinema. Halfway through, I’d virtually decided not to spend more time on it by doing a note afterwards: I was ready to report ‘Words fail me, as they often fail Joanna Hogg’s untalkative protagonists’ and leave it at that. Then something happened that made me laugh. Hogg’s films are well known for their minimal camera movement. An hour in, Exhibition had already featured several passages which recorded real time (in)action – ‘slow cinema’ hardly begins to describe it. I was watching a shot of the principal female character sitting in bed and it was several minutes before I realised that the screen had frozen: I’d inadvertently logged out.
I still didn’t think Exhibition was worth writing about but, after seeing it through, I looked up three reviews online – by Peter Bradshaw, Robbie Collins and Mark Kermode – as well as Rotten Tomatoes. That the film currently holds a 94% rating from 17 reviews isn’t a surprise. There are elements that will make plenty of critics nervous of censure. Joanna Hogg’s direction has a classy froideur (and, to be fair, she creates some beautiful images – not all of them chilly). The modernist London house which is both the setting and the star of Exhibition is a real house, designed by James Melvin, who died in 2012 (his hundredth year) and to whom the film is dedicated. The two main characters are both contemporary artists and each has a single initial in place of a forename. Mark Kermode’s balanced review is admiring of Hogg rather than excited about the film but Robbie Collin and, especially, Peter Bradshaw sound as if they actually enjoyed Exhibition. Bradshaw’s enthusiasm isn’t remotely infectious but I assume that, for many people, his opinion counts so his rave review shouldn’t be overlooked. Although he writes for a larger audience than Joanna Hogg is probably expecting for her film, she and Bradshaw deserve each other. His criticism has strong emperor’s-new-clothes tendencies to start with. When he’s extolling a movie with corresponding dress sense it’s a match made in purgatory.
Bradshaw describes Exhibition as ‘an enigma manipulated and maintained with mastery’ and Joanna Hogg’s approach as:
‘… something that might be called asatirical: the anxieties of the bohemian classes are held up for stringent inspection, but not ridicule. D and H are … subtly different from Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as the troubled couple in Michael Haneke’s 2005 drama Hidden, who like D and H live high-status lives almost barricaded inside a gorgeous modern home in the middle of a capital city.’
I don’t know how Bradshaw defines the ‘bohemian classes’ but it’s virtually impossible to regard D and H as representative of any social group, however culturally exclusive it may be. The couple resemble the Hidden couple only in that they ‘live high-status lives almost barricaded inside a … modern home in the middle of a capital city’. (I don’t remember the Auteuil-Binoche habitat as ‘gorgeous’.) The couple in the Haneke film have a son. Bradshaw has already noted that D and H are childless. While the various dramatic events that disturb their comfortable life naturally put a strain on their relationship, there’s little suggestion in the early stages of Hidden that the marriage of Anne and Georges is in trouble. In contrast, D and H seem pissed off with each other from the start of Exhibition: putting their house on the market – one of the few definite happenings in the film and something which preoccupies and troubles D particularly – doesn’t appear to have a decisive effect on their relationship. They’re rarely amiable with each other; what closeness they achieve is through having sex although there’s not much sign either enjoys it. The domestic life of Haneke’s couple is somewhat recognisable; D and H, both working from home, communicate in their separate offices through an intercom system. (This is used by the couple to transmit questions or reassurances about still loving each other or to agree to have sex or for a short conversation about the central heating boiler.) Whereas Georges’ history and activities outside the home are a main part of Hidden, Joanna Hogg shows what D, much more than H, gets up to on her own. (She spends a lot of time trying on various bizarre, theoretically erotic costumes and making elaborate preparations for masturbation.) I suspect that Peter Bradshaw invokes Hidden for no better reason than that this was a famously enigmatic arthouse hit (although its determination to be enigmatic was its limitation). He’s just name-dropping.
There’s one other big difference between the couples in Hidden and Exhibition. Anne and Georges were interpreted by two superb actors. D and H are played by non-actors that plenty of people will have heard of (though I hadn’t). Viv Albertine (D) first came to prominence as a member of a punk group called the Slits. Liam Gillick (H) is a Turner Prize-nominated conceptual artist. Albertine and Gillick are able to emulate proper actors in one respect: they occasionally think up lines that keep improvised conversations going even though you don’t believe it’s what their character would say. Otherwise, the effect of their non-performances is to make the proper actors in smaller parts – Tom Hiddleston as an estate agent, Mary Roscoe as a neighbour – look as if they’re overacting. (There’s a minor variation in Viv Albertine’s playing during D’s infrequent excursions to the world outside: when she buys a copy of The Big Issue or puts money in a busker’s cap she seems to perform the action. This is probably meant to be a comment on the difference between public and private selves but it just looks incredibly daft.) I think, though, that Joanna Hogg has probably been very smart in how she’s cast the two leads. Because they convey nothing beyond sounding (usually) whingey (D) and snide (H), they enrich the mystery of Exhibition for the likes of Peter Bradshaw. That mystery includes why anyone would find D or H even slightly interesting.
4 May 2014
