As shamelessly biased as I am towards the monumental abilities of our
transcendent goddess of cinephilia that is La Tilda of Swinton (she is, without any shadow of doubt in my mind, the greatest living screen actor), I was still a
little in awe of her raw, not to mention brave, performance as Julia. She is
utterly convincing as, let's be honest here, a quite repulsive woman. Someone
who, at the very least, is profoundly flawed - a self-centred alcoholic lush who
cares about no-one and wears her propensity towards self-destruction on her
sleeve. Who then goes one step further towards obliterating any last vestiges of
sympathy she may have elicited from the people around her and us, the audience,
by doing the unthinkable - kidnapping a child for ransom. If that isn't bad enough, the rough treatment she metes out on the boy is nothing short of spiteful and cruel. Her careless attitude is unflinching (locking him in the boot of her car till he shits himself, screaming obscenities at him while waving a gun in his face, gagging him and leaving him tied to the radiator of the motel room, abandoning him in the Mexican desert at night). It's deeply upsetting to watch and you wonder how you can engage with this mascara smeared devil. And yet yes, we are still rooting for her! Highsmith fans will be smacking their chops.
It's not until the last 40 minutes or so, when the mother instinct breaks through the seemingly hard-as-nails but still very brittle exterior, that her humanity and compassion spills out at last. (It's been an emotional slog getting there so our relief is palpable). As she awakes (from a night of filth with her Mexican trick) and her poor wretched captive tyke is led in to her, bathed in the warm orange and yellow glows of a South American sunrise, the dispossessed lush and motherless son seem to bond. It's a profoundly moving scene (reminding me a little of the restorative feel that the later scenes in Irreversible invoked) and just about stops you wanting to kick Julia into submission. Can Julia redeem herself? Well, she does try - she really does. Unfortunately for them it may be too late for redemption, as events take a terrible turn and spiral even further out of Julia's control and we wonder if anyone will get out of this alive?
The ending is frustratingly abrupt but also kind of perfect - I'd love to know how things panned out but whatever happens next is a whole different story of course and nothing is better than our imagination for filling in the gaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment