My boyfriend is authoritarian: a review of the film "The Truth About Me"
A poignant but abrupt codependency drama starring Ruth Wilson.
Kate is in her thirties, she works at the labor exchange, dreams of travel and romance. Having succumbed to the charm of one of her clients (Tom Burke), the woman unexpectedly finds herself drawn into an unpredictable manipulative relationship, which with each meeting takes on a frightening scale.
Kate has a name, and with it and independence (at least, she thinks so). She does not know the name of the new mysterious companion, writing it down in the phone book as Blondin. From the very beginning, he declares that he recently got out of prison, and immediately offers to have lunch during a break. Because of loneliness, Kate agrees, sex takes place right in the parking lot, there are no obligations, and yet the heroine desperately wants to cling to a new person and experience fleeting happiness. She does not yet know that the following days and weeks will become an exhausting and torture "groundhog day". The blonde will appear and disappear, invite you to a lake hidden from prying eyes and on cruises, borrow a car and not return it, gradually adjust Kate to her model of behavior and way of thinking, emotionally terrorize and "gaslight" (a form of psychological violence in which one person manipulates to others and deliberately distorts reality so that the other (more often the other) doubts his own adequacy.
The director of "Pravda" Harry Wootleaf, after the debut melodrama "Only You" with Josh O'Connor, turns to material that is harsher and widespread in romantic relationships. The film is based on the novel by Deborah Kay Davis, True Things To Know About Me, and is an effective statement, but as if squeezed out in advance, not fully insisted and worked out. From the protagonist's blurry past to her vague intentions and desires, Blond's second-rate charisma, semi-toxic relationships with her family - the film lacks substantiation, as if it is lost halfway and hidden under the crushing camera work and nervous editing.
Kate constantly falls out of favor with her boss, because of a new relationship, she quarrels with her best friend and has clear signs of depression, triggered by an event unknown to the audience. The relationship is progressing: the blonde criticizes Kate's shoes, uses them, bringing them to exhaustion, brings them to a party and leaves them alone, forcing them to doubt reality (perhaps Kate of the companion projected, which would give the action and analysis of the heroine a new curious round, but no). Wilson grasps the image believably, but ends up straying in the plotted coordinates and stays strictly within the Wootliff script. Burke replenishes his portfolio of the roles of a narcissist and an emotional abuser: he, of course, does it best - ominous and piercing, but if in the Souvenir dilogy by Joanna Hogg both hypostases were delicately, painfully and brilliantly played out, then here, in addition to the overwhelming shell, there are chances he has no choice but to demonstrate the new facets of his resume.
Wutliff's position is also not very clear: make an important conclusion about uninsured against toxic relationships? Then why does the ending look cut from a completely different story, as if playing PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me song alone would be enough for many years of emancipation ahead? How can one night with myself on the dance floor in a foreign country be released from the mental prison in which the heroine has been for the previous hour and a half (and possibly years)? And this is not even a criticism of the validity of such situations (if they really happened, you just need to support and rejoice at the easy release of victims of emotional / physical abuse), but bewilderment from the chosen tactics of Wutliff. The feeling of a powerful swing and weak realization does not leave during the entire viewing, although the intentions are good, and the picture is technically well equipped, especially in the scene of Kate's personal "crash" in a thunderstorm and gushing rain (brilliant work of decorators and cameraman Ashley Connor, who worked with Josephine Decker over the theatrical indie horror "Madeleine Madeleine").
The Truth About Me "repeatedly denotes the danger and, alas, a certain inevitability of romantic involvement in communication with" psychological vampires "and becomes another ordinary commentary on the problem, made in a hurry. Anamnesis is not needed here, therapy is all the more so as they are more willing to fall into uncomfortable and little logical common truths.
This article was sponsored by Douglas Owen
Commenti