COUPLE IN A HOLE
Cast: Paul Higgins, Kate Dickie, Jerome Kircher,
Corinne Masiero
Director: Tom Geens
Basic human emotions are viewed through a prism of both reality and borderline surreality as bereaved Scottish couple Karen and John (Dickie and Higgins) remove themselves from society into an extreme existence, in a muddy cave beneath the trees within the French Pyrenees. Attempting to come to terms (and failing) with the death of their son by embracing a spartan survival attempt, John forages to maintain some semblance of life by grasping any tenuous food source in the woods, whilst trying to ensure they remain untouched and unfettered by local humanity in the nearby village.
On a rare excursion from the ‘hole’, a venomous spider bites Karen – forcing a hugely reluctant John into town to seek an antidote from a pharmacist. Nearby he is offered solace and assistance from a decent man offering support and rather uneasily he thus begins a slight association leading to a form of friendship with this individual - a local farmer Andre (Kircher). The farmer’s wife Celine (Masiero) is aware of a fire which caused both the death of the couple’s boy and their resultant withdrawal into nature – causing her enormous unease at her husband’s burgeoining relationship with John and therein lies the link.
Both leads, Paul Higgins and Kate Dickie are mesmerisingly brilliant and the film is stunning to watch, as John’s mounting desire for a return to the life he once knew grows at odds with Karen’s need to remain isolated, with the lush backdrop of greens and browns in the shadowy forest and tree encased mountains offering a tempting aura of retreat in a comparative world of chaos.
Time Out Of Mind
Cast: Richard Gere, Ben
Vereen, Jena Malone,
Steve Buscemi, Kyra Sedgwick
Director: Oren Moverman
1hr 58
Richard Gere moves further into indie territory here in a stripped-down, atmospheric film about the culture of virtual anonymity and the subsequent struggle to maintain our basic instinct for survival that is homelessness. Gere’s brutal haircut and bitty grey beard with a battered worse for wear coat and scarf the outer garment of which his character George sells for a little money at a local store. Writer/ Director Oren Moverman’s film is beautifully paced - almost in serene silence during the first half, as the protagonist fills each day with sleeping rough on New York City benches, eeking out what food he can from rubbish bins, and grabbing brief snoozes in hospital waiting rooms before being thrown out. One evening walking through the neon-kit central streets, through a window, he notices a young woman working in a bar - Maggie (Jena Malone). Ashamed to enter himself, he asks a passer-by to hand in some photographs - which result in her being reduced to tears,
It is quite evident that she is his daughter, but Time Out of Mind deliberately side-steps any predictable conventions. As George parks himself on benches, or straggles around on his relentless journeys from nowhere to nowhere, we become more and more aware of the constant noises and pressures of external city life in the huge expanse of New York and begin to fully engage with the blindingly horrendous pain of loneliness - of the many homeless and destitute souls we pass by each day, failing to even relate for a moment as to the reasons why they ended up in such a situation, something so many of us are only two months of no income away from.
The director’s long, unbroken takes allow him to emphasise Richard Gere’s spellbinding performance, with a fixed gaze upon George as he moves hopelessly and helplessly from street corner to homeless shelter to bureaucratic office (encountering brief appearances from Steve Buscemi and Kyra Sedgwick).
The film’s bare-bones approach is quite wonderful – with Gere embodying George as a wounded animal in a strange and foreign land. The longer he’s George, the less one becomes aware that is a highly established screen actor - and it closes on a beautiful fade following a heartrending final confrontation between George and Maggie, which again avoids sentiment or predictability. A quite outstanding piece of work.
