I greatly admired Joanna Hogg's 'Unrelated' and looked forward to 'Archipelago' with eager anticipation. From the evidence of the first film, she appeared to be intimately acquainted with the social strata she was examining and did so with intelligence, compassion and considerable panache. It played well. I wish I could say that of her second outing.
Hogg appeared to be shooting a first draft of a script, or at times, not even that, just barely formed ideas. But if she had taken the time to think through the layers and to hone the script, narrative coherence, with resonant layers of meaning, could have been achieved. As it was, her actors were floundering. There was nothing going on behind their eyes. They didn't know what to say, or how to play a scene because they had no deep understanding of their characters. They were lost. What Hogg achieved was her actors' embarrassment, not her characters'. It appears that she let the camera run and the truth that lies behind and beneath is not revealed this way, only a surface banality. You have to dig for truth and Hogg clearly hadn't done the work. A well honed script is like a solid skeleton. A body can't stand up without it.
A bewildering admiration of the script-less film persists in some circles. There is a misguided belief that such a film is Art. I would appeal for the scales to fall from the eyes and the fog to lift. The script-less film is ill disciplined, lazy and arrogant; there is an unwillingness to communicate. If Hogg had given her story, her themes and her script more deliberation, she could have achieved a penetrating piece of work. She certainly would have ironed out the inconsistencies and the many cases of the ridiculous.
To point to a few. Rose, trained at Ballymaloe (a top cookery school) would not have needed lectures on lobsters and plucking birds (head up). Neither would she be squeamish about the former and still get the latter wrong (head shown to be down). And as for the risible scene in the empty restaurant, the point has already been made that the absent father is a keen shot, so why is this family ignorant about guinea fowl? And why do we see so much of Christopher, with no paint on his brush, dabbing at the same bit of canvas and given to rambling, pretentious utterances. Much is made of the fact that this is strictly family, so why the two outsiders, Christopher and Rose, anyway? Families like this would close ranks, all muck in and produce the meals together, play scrabble and certainly not spend the time having meaningless painting lessons. I wish Chloe, the girlfriend, and Will, the father, had come because then there might have been real fireworks. We could have got to the heart of the matter instead of dabbling away on the surface. A missed opportunity.
Hogg appeared to be shooting a first draft of a script, or at times, not even that, just barely formed ideas. But if she had taken the time to think through the layers and to hone the script, narrative coherence, with resonant layers of meaning, could have been achieved. As it was, her actors were floundering. There was nothing going on behind their eyes. They didn't know what to say, or how to play a scene because they had no deep understanding of their characters. They were lost. What Hogg achieved was her actors' embarrassment, not her characters'. It appears that she let the camera run and the truth that lies behind and beneath is not revealed this way, only a surface banality. You have to dig for truth and Hogg clearly hadn't done the work. A well honed script is like a solid skeleton. A body can't stand up without it.
A bewildering admiration of the script-less film persists in some circles. There is a misguided belief that such a film is Art. I would appeal for the scales to fall from the eyes and the fog to lift. The script-less film is ill disciplined, lazy and arrogant; there is an unwillingness to communicate. If Hogg had given her story, her themes and her script more deliberation, she could have achieved a penetrating piece of work. She certainly would have ironed out the inconsistencies and the many cases of the ridiculous.
To point to a few. Rose, trained at Ballymaloe (a top cookery school) would not have needed lectures on lobsters and plucking birds (head up). Neither would she be squeamish about the former and still get the latter wrong (head shown to be down). And as for the risible scene in the empty restaurant, the point has already been made that the absent father is a keen shot, so why is this family ignorant about guinea fowl? And why do we see so much of Christopher, with no paint on his brush, dabbing at the same bit of canvas and given to rambling, pretentious utterances. Much is made of the fact that this is strictly family, so why the two outsiders, Christopher and Rose, anyway? Families like this would close ranks, all muck in and produce the meals together, play scrabble and certainly not spend the time having meaningless painting lessons. I wish Chloe, the girlfriend, and Will, the father, had come because then there might have been real fireworks. We could have got to the heart of the matter instead of dabbling away on the surface. A missed opportunity.