London Film Festival 2011: 360

I'd hoped to tick off 360 in Toronto, but that plan was kaiboshed by the fact the preceding screening (of Alexander Payne's The Descendants) started 75 minutes late and completely scuppered the day's  schedule for me. In retrospect, I cannot believe how patiently everyone sat there. A screening of Take This Waltz about a week afterwards began less than ten minutes late in San Sebastian, prompting the crowd to slow-handclap the jury for keeping them waiting. Now, the reason I mention this is because both those events made me wonder about London audiences. I think a ten-minute delay wouldn't even be noticed, but 75? There'd be uproar. But, funnily enough, London audiences are reserved in other ways. If it had screened in Cannes or Venice, there's a high chance that Fernando Meirelles' latest feature would have been booed. At the Odeon Leicester Square, it merely generated a strong ripple of applause, and quite a bit of disappointed muttering in the queues for the exits.

The damning one-star reviews that appeared out of Toronto weren't really merited, but it must be said that 360 isn't a very good film, partly because of the platitudinous script but mostly because it is what it is: a collage. Set in various locations across the world – London, Vienna, Paris, Bratislava, Denver airport and Phoenix – it purports to be a reflection of the way our lives interconnect and how such things as chance, fate, luck and coincidence affect our destiny. This is rather heavily laid out in an opening voiceover (“A wise man once said, if there's a fork on the road take it. He failed to mention which way to turn.”), and throughout the movie much is made of the consequences that taking that fork will have. But there are a couple of problems with this idea. We face a million or more “forks” in the road every day. And all of them have consequences, from major to minor. So where to start?

Peter Morgans earnest script deals with this moral swamp by creating situations for his characters that border on caricature. In the opening scene a Slovakian woman gets a job with an escort agency, and her first client is a nervous businessman, Michael (Jude Law), whose tryst is spotted by a business associate who uses the information to blackmail him into handing over a lucrative contract. Back home, his wife Rose (Rachel Weisz), is having an affair with a Brazilian photographer, whose girlfriend has decided to leave him and is on her way home to Rio. On the way, she encounters two men. One is a grieving father (Anthony Hopkins), who is searching for his daughter, and another is a freshly released sex offender (Ben Foster), who is on his way to a halfway house. And so on...

There are a couple more storylines, but you get this gist. This is one of those we-are-the-world storylines that, rather counter-intuitively, boils down to cause and effect. By that I mean the film simply paddles along on the assumption that what we do determines where we go – but I wanted to see more character, because, surely, it's who we are that determines where we go? In 360 everyone is driven by logic. Michael accedes to blackmail after the flimsiest of threats (along the lines of “Hello, Michael's wife, I'm a complete stranger but I'm sure you'll trust me when I'll tell you that your husband once tried to hire a hooker one night but didn't actually go through with it because I accidentally busted him”). In this respect, it doesn't even feel like a successive series of short films, since almost none of these stories would pass muster on their own.

The one exception involves Russian actor Vladimir Vdovichenkov, who plays Sergei, the right-hand man to a sleazy gangster. He is his boss's bitch, carrying his guns, hiring his hookers, and he's getting tired of it. This was the only sequence that, for me, carried any real emotion or drama, and the bear-like Vdovichenkov gives the part a really charming subtlety and pathos. It was the one spark of what-might-have-been in a film that doesn't really have much to say except that one thing leads to another. For Peter Morgan it's certainly a step up from the dreadful Hereafter, but for Meirelles it's a huge disappointment. His last film, Blindness, was nowhere near as bad as the reviews suggested, but that's film's weaknesses (trite sentimentality, too-literal voiceover, clumsy plotting) are carried over into 360. It sounds like a back-handed compliment, but this overly serious Richard Curtis-style patchwork is the kind of thing Hugh Grant might make if he ever took up directing: it's heart's in the right place, but it comes from another world that isn't recognisably ours.