Breaking Free
THE ESCAPE I Gemma Arterton tackles taboos in a hard-hitting marital drama…
We think we’ve got it all sorted,” says writer/director Dominic Savage. “But no one has really.” This familiar illusion of satisfaction is dispelled in The Escape, an achingly sad, shot-on-a-shoestring drama about ‘bolters’ – mothers who abandon their families. “I thought, to go through that from a female perspective would be both difficult and challenging,” Savage adds.
Making her producing debut, Gemma Arterton plays Tara, a suburban mum with two healthy kids and a loving husband. But Tara yearns for more, and may be suffering from a form of postnatal depression – her affliction brushed off by family as ‘a phase’, the words ‘mental illness’ never muttered.
Chief among those who fail to understand is Tara’s husband Mark, Arterton re-uniting with Tamara Drewe co-star Dominic Cooper. “He’s not a horrible man,” Cooper tells Teasers. “He’s provided for his family, but he clearly doesn’t know who she is.”
That lack of understanding proves suffocating for Tara who, pointedly, isn’t referred to by her own name until the mid-way mark when the film takes a dramatic turn, as Tara hops on the nearby Eurostar to Paris. “I wanted this sense of fantasy to the escape,” Savage says. “The characters she meets,
the artistic-ness of it, and the freedom of it… and yet the absolute guilt of it, too, which then seeps in.”
Developed by Arterton and Savage, the film’s shooting script consisted of a 30-page outline, which provided the structure of a story within which Arterton and Cooper could improvise – the organic way of working enabled Savage to shoot the film in just 16 days.
Not that you can tell, with Arterton on the finest form of her career as what may broadly be considered an unsympathetic figure. “I never wanted her to be that,” Savage counters. “She may not be liked at times, but as long as her reasons are understood, nothing else mattered. Hopefully, it’ll touch a lot of nerves.”
ETA | MAY / THE ESCAPE OPENS NEXT MONTH.