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Michael Brooke admires this British take on the traditional European art-movie

One of the biggest critical hits of recent months, Joanna Hogg’s debut feels both reassuringly familiar and strangely original. Familiar, because it’s from a longstanding European art-movie tradition, anatomising the underlying psychology of relationships as much through silence and elision as through conventional dialogue. Original, because its characters are normally caricatured into oblivion, being members of Britain’s comfortably-off middle classes as they holiday in Tuscany. However, this is no Aga saga but a painfully acute dissection of loneliness, unfulfilled expectations and unbridgeable generational divisions.

Fortysomething Anna, her childless marriage potentially on the rocks, joins old friends relaxing in Italy with their teenage children – including Tom, with whom Anna strikes up a rapport. But just when a romance seems to be developing, trivial incidents steer the film into more emotionally knotted territory. Hogg cites Bresson and Ozu as inspirations. It shows: static images are combined with a soundtrack that allows crucial scenes to happen offscreen – but within Anna’s earshot.

 

Michael Brooke on 30th January 2009
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