Friday, the first 'proper' day at Sundance 2011, began with one of the best films I've seen in the Dramatic Competition here. Ever. Sean Durkin's feature debut Martha Marcy May Marlene is a hit on several levels, not simply because it takes a highly original subject (for these conservative times) but because it is so dramatically assured, with an outstanding performance by a hitherto unknown (to me) Olsen sister (Elizabeth). The piece I'm about to write pertains to the cut I saw today, although even if Durkin is ever persuaded to trim or re-edit his feature debut, it will likely make hardly any difference to the film you will – and if you read my stuff regularly you definitely will – eventually see. It's arguably a bit long and maybe opaque to begin with, but Martha... (as it shall now be known), is an excellent, sharply written character-based thriller that really gets under the skin and stays long in the mind.
Olsen plays Martha, who, at the beginning of the movie, is in a state of agitation. She's leaving the weird, mixed-sex communal home she shares near New York with some 20-somethings her own age – and seeing that indie star Brady Corbet is one of their number means that things are not likely to be going well there. Martha calls her sister (Sarah Paulson) to come and fetch her, and soon she's at her sister's holiday home, which she shares with her architect husband (Hugh Dancy). What follows is a very, very beautifully judged mosaic, which reveals not only how fucked up Martha is in her interactions with her only remaining family but also the reasons that made her that way, because, in short, it transpires that Martha has been in thrall to Patrick (John Hawkes) a modern-day Charles Manson who grooms damaged women and inducts into them to his seductive, sinister and ultimately lethal order.
Martha... is a slow burn for its opening 20 minutes or so, but, for me, the turning point comes when, in flashback, Patrick unveils his bewitching (and, it must be said, not very good*) “song” for the easily-led Martha, who will be renamed twice in the movie, first with her cult name Marcy May, which Patrick bestows upon her, and again with her criminal name Marlene. If Durkin has not read Ed Sanders' book The Family, about Charles Manson and his murderous hippie entourage, I will buy an edible hat and eat it. This is simply the best film so far made about that 60s bete noir's operation, about the way he cynically corrupted youth with his sexualised violence and bogus psychobabble "philosophy".
As Manson did, Patrick takes his boys and girls on strange breaking-and-entering sessions and tells his girls not to fear death because it is the “ultimate love" (why? because it causes fear, and fear “brings you to now”). Hawkes is terrific in this role, but his dialled-down bogeyman – stark, wiry and chillingly convincing – would not work without the equally striking performance from first-timer Olsen, whose impenetrable glassy-eyed state of wounded trauma sits easily between Catherine Deneuve's in Repulsion and Maggie Gyllenhaal's in Sherry Baby. It takes a while to catch fire, but when it does, Durkins' film is tense and breathtakingly claustrophobic, with a stunning tease ending and a soundtrack that foregrounds the mesmeric, wistfully soulful Jackson C Frank. If it doesn't find a UK home, I'll buy an another edible hat and eat that too.
(*Er, it turns out to be a Jackson C Frank song too! My bad...)
No comments:
Post a Comment