One of the most widely-acclaimed British films of recent years, this bittersweet tale set in the coastal marshes of Maldon has both quiet intensity and narrative ingenuity. A subtle and confident tale of the aftermath of relationships and complex romantic entanglements.
Owing to the worst trailer of recent years (a glutinous affair in which Voiceover Man outdoes himself spelling out how Life Affirming and Genuinely Touched By Magic the film is), any audience still inclined to watch The Lawless Heart is liable to do so with the lowest of expectations. But this is the kind of film that really doesn’t (and ought not to) \"do\" trailers: its virtues - good writing, tempered performances, sensitive direction - are those that only become apparent over a longer length of time, and are those most often neglected by filmmakers and audience alike.
Its structure isn’t that far from something like Run Lola Run. We start at point A (a wake) and end up at point B (a birthday party), and make the journey in between the two three times. Minor characters from the first journey take on more significance in the following two, and slowly, gaps in our knowledge of the story start to be filled in. The first run is in the company of Dan (Bill Nighy), husband of the dead man’s sister, whose flirtation with the French owner of the local flower shop (Clementine Celarie) takes him away from his wife and kids; the second follows Nick (Tom Hollander), the dead man’s boyfriend, as he tries to get on with his life and work out loose-end relationships with his lover’s family and hangers-on; and the third hitches up with Tim (Douglas Henshall), the dead man’s cousin, who arrives back in town just in time to realise he’s drifted through a life in which he’s so far failed to achieve any good.
Set in a pretty but inert Essex coastal town where there initially seems nothing to do but wait to die, and populated by characters living on or only just above the poverty line, this reveals more about the English psyche than Gosford Park, not just because of Nighy’s consummately English, very funny performance, but also - to a large degree - due to the situations the characters keep finding themselves in: the film is full of meals with uninvited diners, parties whose guests are desperate to escape, clubs where people just don’t want to dance.
Beyond that, though, the abiding influence is distinctly European. The Lawless Heart demonstrates just how deeply Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy have affected all those who have seen them. That’s especially evident in the second story here, laced with visual references to Blue, and in which the often unbearable Hollander tones down the shriller, camp aspects of his screen persona to deliver as still and as astute a performance of numbed grief as Juliette Binoche did in the Kieslowski film.
One advantage Kieslowski had was making three separate films in which to tell a greater variety of stories. In the modern-day British film industry, there’s no guarantee of funding for one movie, let alone a trilogy, and so writer-directors Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger have had to cram three love triangles into the same feature. Even so, the script works up considerable, almost mathematical levels of complexity over its varied menages-a-trois; the third part sees a man and a woman (let’s call them Miss X and Mr. Y) try to conduct a relationship in the present day haunted by the fact that Miss X\'s ex is Mr. Y’s adopted brother. And each story has one masterstroke of acting: Nighy’s flinch away from an approaching stranger when he finds himself talking out loud about his feelings is matched by Hollander’s barely perceptible squirm upon learning his new flatmate is a smoker, and a superlatively written and performed bit of business in the final third involving the putting of !
ice in drinks. As good an example of the \"grown-up\" British cinema as there’s been of late.
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