Jamie Adams (2019)

In the final minutes of Balance, Not Symmetry, the young heroine Caitlin (Laura Harrier) reflects that, ‘Everything seems to be sorting itself out now after being a mess for so long’.  You can say that again.  Jamie Adams’s feature explores the impact of her father’s death on Caitlin, a final year student at Glasgow School of Art.  He focuses on her relationships with her mother Mary (Kate Dickie), also an artist, and Hannah (Bria Vinaite), her fellow student and longstanding friend.  Introducing his film’s world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), Adams acknowledged that he asked a lot of his actors in terms of improvisation.  Too much, in fact:  most of the time, the cast are like a stuck record.  They keep repeating phrases or slightly rearrange the words in them until they think up something else to say.  The effect is often banal; the scenes consistently lack dramatic shape.  At the eleventh hour, Adams realises he needs to bring things to a conclusion.  He introduces a dea ex machina – an established artist (Shauna Macdonald), who visits the final year exhibition and offers Caitlin the job of assistant on her next project.  What about Hannah, though?   She can have a job too, says the artist.  Simple as that!  The words quoted above are addressed by Caitlin to her father, when she visits his grave.  The film’s conventional, facile ending is in sharp contrast to what’s gone before.  After being a mess for so long, Balance, Not Symmetry suddenly and clumsily sorts itself out.

Jamie Adams also explained – from the stage of the Festival Theatre, where his film screened as this year’s EIFF ‘People’s Gala’ presentation – that his mother died when he was nineteen and that he is ‘still processing’ the loss twenty years later.  His strong personal investment in the material may have got in the way.  There are moments in Balance, Not Symmetry unspecific enough to resonate emotionally with many viewers who’ve lost someone close – for example, when Caitlin and her mother sit on a beach, Mary says this was Caitlin’s father’s favourite place and the women gaze out to the vast, silent sea (although this combination is familiar enough to be a cliché).   For the most part, you suspect there’s plenty more in the film that means a lot to Adams but that he’s unable or unwilling to communicate this meaning to others.  For this audience member, it was a bit the same when he expressed his thanks to ‘Buffy Cairo – so much a part of my life since the age of twenty-four’.  Having never heard of Biffy Clyro (a Scottish alternative rock band, m’lud), whose songs supply the soundtrack, I thought Adams was talking about his life partner.  Some of the music does turn out to have emotional heft but of itself, not because of synergy with what’s on the screen.  Unless, that is, you’re Jamie Adams.  (Simon Neil, a member of Biffy Clyro, shares the screenplay credit with him.)

The weakness of the improvisations registers most strongly when what the actor does makes no sense in terms of the character they’re playing.  It’s possible that Caitlin’s and Hannah’s art school teacher Fiona Miller (Tamsin Everton) doesn’t bother preparing her lectures and makes them up as she goes along; what comes over, though, is that it’s Egerton (who’s weak throughout) doing this.  When Caitlin’s mother views her daughter’s final show in Glasgow, Mary can’t find anything more to say than ‘that’s beautiful … that’s stunning’.  She expresses no curiosity about the work.  Her reaction is no doubt the best Kate Dickie could come up with but it’s vexing when Mary is a working artist.  From what she says, she might as well be an estate agent.  In the main role, Laura Harrier avoids such glaring lapses but her characterisation is vague.  Bria Vinaite (the young mother in The Florida Project), as if frustrated by the limits of her part, overplays it.  In a much smaller role, the talented Lily Newmark (Pin Cushion) is the best thing in the film.  She delivers her lines wittily and in a way that gives a hint – it inevitably remains no more than a hint – of a substantial personality behind them.

Newmark plays Stacey, with whom Hannah has a short-lived affair at the same time that Caitlin is having one with Rory (Scott Miller):  these happen in the light of increasing tensions between Caitlin and Hannah (though their relationship isn’t evidently physical).  Both the main girls are American, Caitlin is mixed race – white mother, black father – and I understood that her family had returned only recently from the US to live in Scotland.  If Adams is suggesting that the protagonist’s nationality or ethnicity makes a difference to her situation, I failed to pick it up.  The conclusion to Balance, Not Symmetry is hurriedly cavalier.   Now reconciled with Hannah, Caitlin wants and gets assurance that her best friend will be accompanying her to London to work with the big-name artist.  Caitlin shows no interest, however, on the effect this may have on her mother, who had seemed to be on the verge of suicide even when her daughter went back to Glasgow to complete her studies.  As for Mary, she may have managed only a couple of words about Caitlin’s art but that’s two more than she has to say about this further major change in both their lives.

23 June 2019