Suspension of Disbelief (15) 112 mins **
This jazzy doodle is on one level a conventional
murder-mystery, with Sebastian Koch (The
Lives of Others) as a screenwriter spooked when the twin sister of his
recently deceased lover (Lotte Verbeek, times two) shows up on his North London
doorstep. Yet director Mike Figgis keeps throwing hefty quotation marks around
what we’re watching, whether by cutting away to the storytelling classes Koch is
teaching, flashing up textbook headings (“CHARACTER IS PLOT”) at key intervals,
or folding in scenes from the autobiographical drama the writer is involved
with. The result doesn’t so much flirt with pretension as hole up with it in a
cheap motel for two hours, where Figgis’s typically bold imagemaking and
amusing poison-pen portraits of industry hangers-on have to be set against
uncomfortable-looking leads and an insistently academic air. It’s less a movie
than a series of seminar notes.
Suspension of Disbelief opens in selected cinemas from today.
No comments:
Post a Comment