Anna Welles is a lonely woman in late middle age, separated from
her husband Simon; she works at Peter Jones West End department store as a
salesperson and spends her leisure time attending speed-dating events. It's at
one of these occasions she meets George Stone and returns with him to his flat
in the Barbican. But the evening takes a turn for the worse when Stone assaults
her and she, in an attempt to save herself, batters him to death with a heavy
sculpture. After a swift departure from the flats she realises that she has
left her umbrella in the lift and returns to the building to retrieve it. Coincidently
she runs into DCI Bernie Reid who is investigating the murder. It's this
meeting that triggers the Detectives fascination with this vulnerable women that
eventually leads to his involvement with a murder suspect.
This British/German co-production, which premiered at 2012
Berlin Film Festival is the directorial feature film debut of Barnaby Southgate
who is best known for working in television on such series as Footballers Wives, Bad Girls and Waterloo Road.
This modern film noir was also written by Southgate, which he adapted from the
New York based novel of the same name by Elsa Lewin. Now set mainly in a
timeless London, which is given a similar disaffecting treatment that can be
found in Eran Creevy’s Welcome
to the Punch (2012). It stars the director’s mother, Charlotte Rampling as
the femme fatale Anna with Gabriel Byrne as Bernie Reid. It’s a psychological thriller about two lonely
alienated characters, an isolated policemen and a mysterious women, who, we are
led to believe, hide secret dark pasts.
Gabriel Byrne. |
Influenced by the noir relationships found in the French cinema
of the 1970’s and 80’s the movies strength is in the elegance of Charlotte
Ramplings performance and the atmospheric cinematography of Ben Smithard (My Week with Marilyn 2011, The Damned United 2009) but the problem
with the film is that the narrative is obscure, it involves a tragic incident
in Anna’s life that’s never fully explained, in fact its rather muddled ending
spoils what could have been an excellent underlying study of the fear of
solitary old age.
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