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Friday, July 18, 2014
Friday, July 18, 2014
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There are few things more tedious than having someone tell you their dreams. This is precisely the same tedium that Mood Indigo induces: “and then the alarm clock turned into a spider, and a little mouse man ran out of a pipe, and then an eel popped its head out of a tap and I had to chase it! Isn't that CRAZY?!” If your measure of good filmmaking is how much random bullshit you can cram into a movie, then director Michael Gondry's latest definitely delivers.
The largely irrelevant plot concerns the relationship of Colin (Romain Duris) and Chloe (Audrey Tatou). Early in the film they meet, fall in love and get married. Then Chloe gets infected by a water lily which grows in her lung. Treatment is expensive and soon Colin's finances are spent, forcing him to take up a job incubating proton guns (which involves him lying on a pile of dirt for 24 hours at a time). Pretty crazy, right? Well, not really - underneath the constant visual assault and self-consciously surreal plot developments it's actually a straightforward terminal illness weepie, but one so wrapped up in tawdry quirks that it's difficult to care.
I have a hell of a lot of time for Michel Gondry: one of the smartest, most inventive directors around. His successes, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and his brilliant music videos are awe-inspiring works of genius. I even have a soft spot for his failures: Green Hornet was a deserved flop, but even within that there's solid gold nuggets of sublime cinema. With all that in mind it's with a heavy heart that I have to report that Mood Indigo just isn't very good.
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| What a wacky car. What will they think of next? |
From the opening shots you sense that this is the product of a director let off the leash. It's as if Gondry has gone through his notebooks and realized every unused idea he's ever had – throwing everything into making this the most Michel Gondry film ever. But, like guzzling down a big box of chocolates in one go, too much of a good thing makes you sick. Concepts that would have made for a great three or four minute music video are splattered hodgepodge throughout the movie – and worse, they don't mean anything other than being weird for the sake of being weird.
For example, what does an ice-rink attendee having the head of a pigeon mean? How much does it inform us as to the themes of the film to have a pair of shoes growl like dogs? Why are the side panels of that car made of perspex? All this imagery piles up on top of itself in a chaotic, tangled mess – the few genuinely powerful symbolic elements drowned underneath. Worse, the stop motion, hand-made nature of Gondry's many, many weird gee-gaws induces a kind of doomy queasiness, like being on a drug trip that's starting to go bad.
The upshot of this is the near total crushing of any humanity in the film. Duris and Tatou, so moving together in Cedric Klapisch's recent Chinese Puzzle, do their best to wring a drop of pathos from this material, but even actors of their calibre can't contend with a cinematic world designed to focus our attention anywhere else other than on the human elements. The end result is that when the credits roll you think “that's it?!”
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| Oh right, some kind of cloud thing. Fair enough. |
The closest cinematic companion to Mood Indigo isn't Gondry's previous work, but that of Terry Gilliam. At Gilliam's best, the rush of ideas and imagery is exhilarating, at his worst it induces a numb fatigue in the viewer, like a boxer who's gone a few too many rounds and stopped caring about taking the blows. More specifically, this film reminded me of Gilliam's 2005 nadir Tideland, a nauseatingly unpleasant movie that also throws everything it can at the screen in an attempt to disguise that there's not much going on (also the only film I've ever seen that opens with the director half apologizing as he explains that you probably won't like what you're about to see).
I feel incredibly guilty criticising a film for being too imaginative. The vast majority of cinema is a sludgy grey morass of cliches and banal platitudes. Mood Indigo certainly isn't that – on the rare moments that it does work it becomes briefly magnificent. The slow slide into desaturation throughout the film beautifully conveys depression and guilt, as do the cobwebs and muck that slowly accumulate in our hero's apartment. But these tiny highlights are swamped by a flood of pointless visual bullshit that distracts and annoys much more than it does inform.
For all that I didn't enjoy watching Mood Indigo, it's a difficult film to genuinely dislike. Even if the end result doesn't work, the enthusiasm baked into every single frame very faintly rubs off on you. Then again, I might be singing a more pissed off song had I seen the original 131 minute cut of the film. After a critical beating by festival critics, the theatrical release has been pared down to a svelte 94 minutes. Frankly, even the truncated version feels overlong – by the final act I was bordering on exasperated, checking my watch to see how much more I had to endure.
I respect the creativity that's gone into Mood Indigo. I appreciate the effort it must have taken to make. I'm glad that films like this can exist. But it's there's no escaping that this is a failure as a movie.
★★
Mood Indigo is released August 1st.
Try to imagine Brick Lane without a curryhouse in sight. It's a strange vision. Yet this is exactly what happened to Limehouse. The area used to be synonymous with its Chinese population, mythologised by Victorians as a hazy warren of opium dens populated by sinister Oriental stereotypes with a penchant for luring innocent English girls into a degraded life of sin. These stories were a load of racist rubbish, yet they magnetically drew curious visitors to them. Tourists would take special buses out to experience their first tastes of Chinese cooking and bask in exotic novelty.
The reality of Chinese Limehouse was broadly similar to any enclave of new immigrants: a self-supportive, tightly knit community that establishes themselves in a somewhat downmarket area and runs a limited range of businesses - in Limehouse's case generally laundries and restaurants. As the years ticked by and bombs fell, the buildings of Limehouse degraded and after the War it was decided that something needed to be done. The London County Council proposed to bulldoze the area, rehouse the remaining Chinese families and build modern flats. They were as good as their word - so thorough in their urban clearance that the only traces of the near-hundred year link with the Chinese community are a couple of street names and a tin dragon statue.
Most Londoners probably assume Chinatown is where it's always been, tucked in Disneyland isolation in the tourist-friendly West End. Yellow Earth's The Last Days of Limehouse aims to correct some of that, recreating the end of Chinese Limehouse and ruminating on what the memory of the place is worth.
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| Old Limehouse |
Staged promenade style within the pleasantly dilapidated Limehouse Town Hall, this play that keeps the audience on their toes. Literally. The action takes places at different locales around the Hall, all within one room. At one end there's a recreation of a 1960s Chinese restaurants, in one corner a sitting room and a dinner table at the other end. Over the next 90 minutes this rather minimal set becomes host to a cast of characters that feel like ghosts haunting the space.
As the actors move around the room the crowd bustles after them, constantly moving and regrouping around the actors. As they move the crowd we part like the red sea, the unpredictable nature of the play meaning you never quite know where the next scene is going to pop up. One moment you're standing on tip-toes trying to peer through a forest of people to catch what's going on, the next you're up close and personal with the cast, able to see every bead of sweat upon their face. The overall effect is to make us into invisible yet involved eavesdroppers, reminding me of Punchdrunk's The Drowned Man.
The narrative is centred around the arrival of Eileen Cunningham (Amanda Maud). She was born in Limehouse where her father ran a restaurant, though left at the age of six when her family emigrated to New York. Returning as a woman of means she's dismayed to find that the Limehouse of 1958 barely resembles her memories. Determined to preserve the character of the area she launches an 'urban preservation' campaign, trying her best to rope in as many supporters as possible.
The problem is that most of the remaining British-Chinese residents understand all too well the reasons for the council's decision. They live in the decaying remnants of Victorian housing, without indoor toilets, heating and with open drains - maybe one tiny step away from a genuine slum. They accept that the area is their home but have their eyes on a rosier, modern future. The battle is thus between sentimentalism and practicality - and Mrs Cunningham isn't doing a particularly good job of arguing for the former.
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| How the Victorians liked to imagine Limehouse. |
The play's clear vision and careful judgment shines through from the first scene. This isn't some misty-eyed nostalgia trip into the past, rather an examination of the evolution of urban communities. Central to the story are Johnny and Iris Wong (Matthew Leonhart & Gabby Wong), second generation immigrants and restaurant proprietors. As soon as we meet them we instantly understand them - quite simply, they're Londoners. They talk like Londoners, behave like Londoners and have London aspirations (namely to move somewhere north). Late in the play, Johnny crisply boils down his position on Limehouse to one simple statement "This place has served its purpose."
It's difficult to argue otherwise. The East End has been a safe haven for immigrants for most of its history, both the Huguenot weavers and the Jewish community having moved on to make way for new waves of Londoners. Some day the current Bangladeshi community will move on too. What The Last Days of Limehouse understands is that the end of Chinatown was just part of a natural urban process - fighting it will turn you into King Canute.
But Miss Cunningham, though she's trying to fight back the tide, has a decent point underneath all her half-baked schemes and insulting bluster. She argues that we should be able to see who came before us; the cities should be developed like a coral reef, with organisms building around what came before rather than wholesale demolition. As someone who gets a geeky historical thrill spotting some weathered piece of old London jutting up beside an anonymous, glassy skyscraper, it's hard for me to disagree.
By the closing scenes The Last Days of Limehouse has concluded that while bricks and mortar may be cleared away, the spirit of the place lingers in the memories and in the children of the inhabitants. As one touching scene near the end points out, the descendants of those that scratched a living in this cobbled streets might now gaze down at the site of their shops from within Canary Wharf - the embodiment of the immigration success story.
The Last Days of Limehouse is relevant not only to the Chinese London community wanting a glimpse of their roots but to anyone remotely interested in the way groups of people disperse and accumulate around the contours of cityscapes. It's an excellent play, well-performed, interestingly staged, funny, melancholy and touching all at once. Highly recommended!
'The Last Days of Limehouse' is at Limehouse Town Hall until 3rd August 2014. Tickets available here.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Thursday, July 17, 2014
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As far as ridiculous movie premises go The Purge takes some beating. Set in a near-future US, the government has decreed that the best way to reduce crime is that for one night a year all crime (including murder) is legal. The thinking is that if the populace has a release valve for their repressed anger then the other 364 nights of the year will be relatively peaceful. Amazingly it sort of works - 'Purge Night' is in its sixth year as the film begins and, though it the majority barricade themselves inside their houses and pray for sunrise, it at least appears to generally accepted as a worthwhile endeavour.
This is a sequel to the 2013's The Purge, which used the night as an excuse to stage a relatively low-budget home invasion movie. The sequel sets its sights much higher, guiding us through the streets of Los Angeles as the citizens tear each other apart. With gangs of flamethrower wielding maniacs, van-based minigun nutters and ranting sniper rifle wielding egomaniacs prowling about it's a pretty crazy 12 hours.
Stuck in the middle of all the mayhem is a pretty standard gaggle of stock types. There's mother and daughter pair Eva and Cali, dragged out of their homes by a mysterious paramilitary army. Shane and Liz, whose car breaks down at the worst possible time and the mysterious 'Sergeant' - a thinly veiled ripoff of The Punisher. Thrown together by fate the group pick their way through the carnage, looking for a safe haven - or in The Punisher's case - bloody vengeance.
There's a pungent whiff of John Carpenter to all of this and DeMonaco relishes showing off seedy, urban environments populated with over-the-top, extravagantly costumed weirdoes. The premise allows for a cavalcade of violence throughout, mostly through gunshot wounds. This isn't some splatter flick though, and while you get your fair share of bloody squibs blasting holes in people, a surprisingly amount of the the violence is either threatened or left to our imagination - gotta get that R rating after all.
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| 'yer cast |
The central idea - that an awful lot of Americans are secretly frothing gun-crazy psychopaths with fear of punishment as the only thing stopping them heading off on a Grand Theft Autoesque rampage of death and destruction - is inherently satirical. The Purge: Anarchy is thus easily at its best when its directly engaging with politics. It doesn't feel enough to say the satire here is 'on the nose', more that it's screaming while beating the nose in with a baseball bat.
DeMonaco has refreshingly little time for nuance in his political commentary. Going straight for the jugular, he introduces the concept of being a 'Martyr'. Essentially if you're poor you can sell yourself to a wealthy family as a sacrificial lamb. They'll carve you up and send your relatives a hefty cheque for privilege. DeMonaco shoots this scene like a live action political cartoon - an elderly, dignified working class black man sitting Buddhalike surrounded by grinning, primped, psychotic WASPS.
Better is to come later in the film, when we enter an elite hunting club run by 1%ers with the 99% as their quarry. I have seen few more satisfying things than a load of hoity-toity snobs in suits getting their shit wrecked up bigtime by a very angry Punisher analogue. If nothing else DeMonaco has his finger on what the people want: when a horribly witchy Republican woman is held at gunpoint by our heroes the audience actually began murmuring "shoot the bitch!" at the screen. There's similar assent when we see a mutilated man strung up in front of a bank bearing a sign "This man stole our pensions." Eh, he probably deserved it.
The audience's palpable bloodlust makes you think that maybe DeMonaco is actually onto something with this Purge idea. After all we're all gathered to watch people getting blown away in increasingly creative ways - and it's undeniably pleasurable to watch a bunch of arrogant rich pricks getting theirs at the hands of our firmly proletariat heroes.
It's a shame then that these sequences are broken up by the rest of the film - which turns out to be a pretty by-the-numbers action thriller. The further we get away from political commentary the more we stray into territory that has the unmistakable stink of straight-to-DVD. None of the characters are particularly compelling, well written or well performed, though at least they manage to look believably terrified most of the time.
It's also a bit of a let down visually - the film is bathed in queasy piss-yellowish light that looks a shade too artificial for the grittiness of the material. DeMonaco obviously has it in him to compose a decent shot - there's a few moments that make you sit up and pay attention - but the majority of the direction is pretty bland - especially some of the later action sequences, which are so impersonal they could be lifted straight from any number of B movies.
The Purge: Anarchy is undoubtedly a B-movie; but when it's unapologetically acting out revolutionary wish-fulfilment it's at least a B-Movie with its heart in the right place. The rest of the time it's a faintly bland, largely identikit bit of fluff. This isn't a film to run out and see, but if you want a bit of schlock in your life you could do worse.
★★
Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.
★★
Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist is on limited release from May 13th.
Or, as it could also be titled: Alan Moore the Exhibition. The Great Bearded One aka The Sage of Northampton aka The Prophet of Glycon aka That Grumpy Old Bastard who Hates Movies looms over practically everything in this exhibition - from the distant past of vaudeville right through to the modern day in the blank, grinning face of V. V-masked protesters huddle all around the corners of the space, threatening, powerful and faintly scary. What more perfect symbol of the power of comics could there be?
With the memory of Occupy very much in mind, Art and Anarchy in the UK treats the comic book as a revolutionary medium, its egalitarian principles and disposable nature making it the ideal medium for gauging what's floating around in the British political, social and cultural soup. The scope of the exhibition takes in everything from 15th century illustrated Bibles, through to Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, Viz and the digital comics of the modern era.
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| Photo by GBPhotos |
The figurehead of the exhibition is an excellent illustration by Jamie Hewlett of a hungover, teen superheroine sipping from a hip flask in a Kings Cross back alley. She looks tired, pissed off and grumpy - a perfect summation of not just the influence British writers have had on US comics but also of the increasingly weariness of the superhero concept. This is reflected within the exhibition itself, which consciously shies away from cape clad muscle men bashing each other through buildings. So it's pleasantly appropriate that the exhibition opens with a quote from Alejandro Jodorowsky: "Kill superheroes!!! Tell your own dreams."
Chances are I'm going to enjoy anything that opens with a Jodorowsky quote - and Comics Unmasked doesn't let me down. I'm relatively familiar with the history of British comicbooks and every corner I turn I'm surprised by the obscure gems they've dug up and popped on display. It's not every day you see Pat Mills' Hookjaw; an environmentally minded shark gore story sitting proudly alongside curios like Zenith's "MAD MENTAL CRAZY!" robot raver Acid Archie or the heartfelt anger of AARGH! - a one off collection protesting the homophobic Clause 28.
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| Suffrage Atelier (1913) |
The crux of Comics Unmasked is explaining the emancipatory potential of comics. The most powerful exhibits are those created by subcultures, the oppressed and the socially shat upon. One of the most striking was the 1913 Suffragette illustration Suffrage Atelier alongside Bryan and Mary Talbot's 2014 Sally Heathcote: Suffragette. Though we just see a few panels of the modern book, the anger and determination on the faces of the women is captured so perfectly it'd take countless pages of text to replicate.
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| Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (BASH! I've really got to check this out :) ) |
Similarly fascinating is the display showcasing the underground comics of the British gay rights movement, particularly the charmingly straightforward It Don’t Come Easy by Eric Presland and Julian Howell. Here two men meet up after a party and quickly check that neither of them is a soldier, sailor, under 21 and that there's no "fuzz under the bed" before going to bed together. Alongside it is a short from AARGH! that juxtaposes snide comments from The Sun newspaper about 'queers' and 'poofters' alongside a man being victimised in a pub by demonic, bristle-headed thugs.
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| From AARGH! |
AARGH!, like an extraordinarily large number of things, can be directly traced back to the hand of Alan Moore (he both contributed to it and published it). Literally every section bears his fingerprints in one way or another. There's a fascinating juxtaposition between the comic art of Victorian Police Gazettes that leeringly shows us queasily sexualised images of Jack the Ripper's victims, and Moore's From Hell (for my money his masterpiece). Even Ally Sloper (whose strip premiered in 1867) has a direct connection to Moore, last being seen in the pages of his The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
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| Lost Girls |
In the Let's Talk About Sex section we encounter pages from Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls - their (often unjustly dismissed) expert examination into the latent sexuality that throbs under the skin of Britain's cultural heritage. Moore proudly and unbashedly describes this work as pornography and its the centrepiece of some fascinatingly British sex art. The clean lines and sensual debasement of Robin Ray's Torrid (1979) says more about the aesthetics and sensiblities of the late 70s / early 80s in one image than countless analytical essays ever could.
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| Cover to Torrid Issue 3 - Robin Ray |
Grant Morrison, The Sex Pistols to Alan Moore's magisterial Beatles, also gets a decent look in. There's something faintly beguiling about seeing Morrison's influential countercultural manifesto The Invisibles displayed behind museum plexiglass - though the two page spread of fox hunters turning their attention to London's homeless is an excellent choice to illustrate the series. Aside from a brief overview of his genre-defining work in Batman and Superman, there's a much needed exhumation of his ultra-obscure 1990 The New Adventures of Hitler - this exhibition marking the first time I've ever seen it in the flesh.
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| Here an apparition of Morrissey appears in Hitler's wardrobe. This really needs a reprint. |
Though Morrison gets a decent look in there's no denying that this is very much Alan Moore's exhibition; his work outnumbering every other creator on display by at least two to one. As a Moore fan I don't have the slightest problem with this - he's one of the most fascinating creative minds working in Britain today and it's refreshing to see an examination of his work that's not a perfunctory summary of V for Vendetta, From Hell and Watchmen (if I never again read that this was one of Time Magazines 100 all-time best novels I will die happy).
What the scope and quality of this exhibition impresses upon you is that Britain is an absolute world-class leader in comic books. Sod traditional exports like football, movies and pop music - Britain absolutely kills it in the field of comics. This exhibition is stuffed to the rafters with smart, politically minded and forceful pieces of graphic art that're the cultural equal of anything else going on in this country. From the sub-sub-subcultural underground comics read by an audience of hundreds to the blockbusting Hollywood adaptation of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass we're owning this shit top to bottom, back to front.
My only criticism is that some of the books on display are a little far away and behind glass, making them difficult to read. Aside from that it's a hell of an exhibition - one of the most intelligently curated I've seen this year. If you have any interest in British counterculture you owe it to yourself to check this out.
'Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK' is at the British Library until 19 August - standard ticket price £9.50.
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
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Back once again on the Screen Robot Filmcast! Me chatting about Begin Again and taking on everyone in a spirited defence of Michael Bay.
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
Tuesday, July 15, 2014
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It's a found footage E.T.
That last sentence could be the most precise description of a film I've ever given, I could stop the review right there and that's all you'd need to know. Well that and it's not as good as E.T. Earth to Echo treats Spielberg's classic as a holy text, slavishly following the plot beat for beat: a gang of scrappy BMX riding suburban kids discover a cute alien that they need to hide from a squad of sinister, van-driving government spooks. Then again, if you're going shamelessly rip off a film then E.T. is at least a good choice and the found footage format freshens things up a bit.
Our four child protagonists are Alex (Teo Halm), Munch (Reese Hartwig), Emma (Ella Wahlestedt) and Tuck (Astro) (no really that's the actor's name). The three boys are fast friends, but on the horizon looms disaster. A freeway is being built on top of their cozy suburban tangle, scattering their families to the four winds. They resolve to do something special together on the last night before they move on - and all are puzzled by the appearance of weird patterns and glyphs on their smartphones. Realising that it's a map they head out into the desert to find where it leads where they find Echo, a cute flying robot alien thing who just wants to phone home. The rest of the film shows the children fixing Echo, rebuilding his ship, summoning new reserves of bravery, learning about what true friendship is etc etc etc.
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| Unfortunately the bikes don't fly. |
Trite stuff, but it's elevated by the excellent performances of the child actors. The core of the movie is the importance of friendship and the four young actors are entirely believable as best friends with each other. The found footage conceit means we get to see a neat divide in the character's personality - when they're aware they're being filmed they behave how they want to be perceived by the others, when they forget we see their 'real' worries and personalities. It's a clever little advantage of the form and gives us a surprising amount of insight into these characters.
Also adding to the pile of positives is the realistic depiction of children interacting with technology. There's a loose framing device that we're watching Tuck's YouTube channel, and the characters display an easy familiarity with technology. Large portions of the movie are spent fixated on smartphone displays, scenes take place over video-conferencing - while technology distances the children from their parents it brings them closer to each other. This all feeds into the character of Echo, essentially a sentient piece of gadgetry. Of course the children are the only ones that really understand him - they're the only ones entirely at ease in a digital world.
That said, Echo himself is a bit of a non-entity. Designwise he's a robotic baby owl and to be honest, the film would largely work if he was an actual baby owl that the children had to return to his nest. An entirely CG creation, he never quite convinces as real - and crucially we never quite believe the children are actually touching him - robbing us of the 'finger-to-finger' moment from E.T. that Earth to Echo shamelessly swipes for its poster. Worse, being entirely CG means that Echo's every appearance drains an obviously stretched budget - resulting in the putative star of the film spending most of the runtime safely tucked away in a backpack.
That said, buried in amongst the middling-to-average special effects there is one shot so stunning it looks as if it's airlifted in from a much higher budget film. Echo and the children are speeding away from their aggressors. A semi-truck bears down on them, and Echo disassembles and reassembles it. Somewhere there's a special effects guy or girl who's showing off a bit - the visual is so good it makes everything else in the film look a little dowdier in comparison.
The found footage genre is in danger of getting a bit stale, and it's arguable that Earth to Echo would work pretty well traditionally shot. I suspect in a few years this glut of characters running around with videocameras, screaming and not framing important things very well will be seen as a fad. Personally, I still enjoy it - it makes scenes that much more intense, dangers is unpredictable and the characters feel in genuine peril. Amping this up is exciting stuff - but perhaps too exciting.
In the screening I attended more than a few children had to be escorted from the cinema in tears during some of the tenser bits that faintly recall The Blair Witch Project (which I still find pants-wettingly terrifying). It's not that this is going to turn audience's hairs white, but even I found some of the quieter moments pretty tense - the found footage technique amplifying every scary moment.
The Sunday morning I awoke to see a 10am Earth to Echo I was unreasonably hungover. I had a splitting headache, a fuzzy mouth and aching limbs. As my alarm beeped away I tried desperately to think of a reason not to see the movie. Why should I drag my exhausted carcass across London to see a shameless E.T. ripoff? I'm just about glad I did - and the film is just about worth seeing. Echo as a character sucks and there's a tonne of questionable directorial decisions but the whole affair is saved by the performances and the occasional dab of nifty special effects.
Or you could watch E.T. on DVD. Your call.
★★★
Earth to Echo is on general release from 18 July.
Monday, July 14, 2014
Monday, July 14, 2014
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The genesis of the show was a digital confessional that Blake set up; an website where people are quizzed as to their past selves. Who did you think you were in the past? What did you want to be? What were you scared of? What would you say to your past self? Nattering on about yourself is a great boost for the ego, and soon she'd amassed responses from all over the world, people of all ages outlining experiences of life. The resulting data is a soup of happiness, fear, nostalgia, embarrassment and regret - and Blake has rolled up her sleeves and pummelled this into a smooth, streamlined hour of songs, visuals and gags.
First things first - Yve Blake is an astonishingly energetic performer. She moves with a loose-limbed gangliness, every motion she makes calculated for maximum effect. Another string to her bow is an enviable comedy rubberface, which gives the impression that we're watching a person who's stepped out of a cartoon. Even better, she knows precisely how command the performance space, her stage persona at both pleasant and slightly intimidating. It feels like every single person in the audience gets a full dose of her laserbeam stare as she drags us into her world, dismantling the barriers between us.
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It's impossible to be presented with the questions Blake asks and not immediately formulate your own responses to them. There's no direct audience participation, but the core reason the show works is that you hear these stories and spot your own thoughts, fears and emotions buried within them. The upshot of that is that this is less a process of gaining new understanding and more a process of reinforcing what you already believe to be true.
It's a sick joke that the more we hear other people's unique insights into the world, the more we realise that people aren't unique at all. From childhood on up we quickly understand that while we (for example) might have thought we were the only person to believe they were literally an alien as a child, there's multitudes that thought the exact same thing. Even when we fiercely assert ourselves as individuals in adolescence we're just adopting another set of pre-worn second hand social signifiers. Then, when we reach middle-age with a couple of kids in tow everyone bleats about how kids are the most important thing ever, followed by the quick onset of depression, followed by our bodies falling apart before we finally lapsing into senile incoherence as our brains trickle out of our ears. Then we pop it.
As the show progressed these realisations gave me cold shivers. After all, the illusion of individuality is one of those things it's best not to think too much about unless you're after existential sleepless nights and being fed it full force through high energy comedy is a bit unsettling. What's worse is that Then never even tries to assign any kind of meaning to the emotions and experiences we're all but forced to experience here. Now, I don't expect Blake to present us with the Meaning of Life but I was quickly craving a bit of philosophic gristle to chew on.
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The lack of depth means the show often teeters on the edge of Saccharine Precipice. For example, an early sequence where we hear cute stories about children is eerily reminiscent of Kids Say the Darndest Things. Similarly cloying is a section where parents explain the "new heights of emotion" they feel at the birth of their children. I can't deny that these are important aspects of being human, but the lack of any real examination or reflection is a symptom of a lack of curiosity. Rather than attempted to understand why, things just are.
There's nothing wrong with a bit of sentimentality and for most of the show Blake just about successfully wobbles down the tightrope, balancing it all with touches of wry humour. Unfortunately towards the end the show goes full-on mawkish - with a straight up painful song about caring for your dying mother as she succumbs to dementia and forgets who you are. As we watch increasingly blurred video footage of a child playing on a beach there may as well have been a big flashing neon sign: "CRY NOW" - the dramatic equivalent of running through the audience holding freshly cut onions.
Ladling it on this thick is a bit much; the overt emotional manipulation curdling some of the goodwill Blake had built up. I've got no beef with a show that wants to make an audience sad, but forcing us to imagine our mothers dying horribly in an effort to wring a couple of tears out of us is misery as pornography. If it was in aid of underlining something genuinely profound about the human condition there'd maybe be an argument - but this is about as meaningful as a Hallmark condolences card.
I don't want to sound like I'm too down on this show - it's an entertaining, imaginative and concise. Yve Blake is an instantly charismatic and obviously smart as hell artist - shows like this and people like her are why I like to write. Most people will enjoy the hell out of Then, but personally, though I appreciate the skill and effort that's gone into its creation, it's not quite my cup of tea.
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