Bill and Bening’s haunting portrait of love on the rocks
Bill Nighy and Annette Bening messily uncouple three decades of middle-class marriage in Hope Gap. The problem is that Edward (Nighy) knows the break-up is coming, while Grace (Bening) has no idea.
We do, though. Their conversation is like a ping-pong game of passive aggression and unspoken resentment played out over the kitchen table. Something has to give.
Edward is a semi-retired history teacher who favours dowdy cashmere pullovers and avoiding conflict. Grace potters about reading poetry on her computer, but also has a demanding side, bolstered by her unswerving Catholic faith.
When the couple’s twentysomething son Jamie (The Crown’s Prince Charles, Josh O’Connor) arrives for the weekend, Edward confides in him... a burden no child should bear. Soon the kitchen table goes flying — with all the crockery — and battle begins.
Grace is terrifying in her anger, green eyes piercing with holier-than-thou moral superiority. This is followed by near-suicidal depression — their house is conveniently located near the Hope Gap beach and white cliffs in Seaford, East Sussex, and the script indulges in several cliffhangers.
The film was adapted by director William Nicholson from his 1999 play The Retreat From Moscow, but never quite expands to fit the big screen. While the cast cannot be faulted, the stagey back-and-forth domestic dialogue runs at full pelt when it might be better to show and not tell. Classical Muzak coupled with shots of white cliffs do not a movie make.
Nor does panning round discarded household objects as reminders of the past.
PERHAPS the play did this better, too, but Edward’s references to Napoleonic soldiers left to die by their comrades on the retreat from Moscow are blindingly obvious. ‘In extremis men can be cruel,’ he tells his history class — but not his wife.
What’s somehow radical here, however, is the way the film mostly follows Grace’s point of view, and she is a difficult creature, hard to empathise with. But she is both magnificent and awful in a scene in a solicitor’s office.
The most amusing moment of revenge occurs when Grace gets a labrador puppy and names him Edward. At least the dog is willing to have his tummy tickled.
Hope Gap reminded me of another intelligent dissection of the unspoken tensions of a long marriage — 2015’s 45 Years, starring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay. Brilliant, devastating and definitely worth streaming, too.
SOMETiMES tender, sometimes unexpectedly brutal,
Matthias And Maxime questions the lifelong friendship of two men, after they end up kissing in a friend’s film.
The talented 31-year-old FrenchCanadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan directs, writes and plays Maxime in the drama, which opens with a reunion at a lakeside house.
Maxime is gay. His friend Matt is a straight, sharp-suited lawyer with a steady girlfriend.
When someone’s annoying little sister, a film student, persuades them to kiss on the sofa for a video, convention falls apart and causes them to question their lives. They end up sharing a waterbed, platonically. Arty swimming scenes also ensue.
Time ticks by as Maxime plans to move to Australia, but Dolan’s film refuses to take the obvious route, and immerses the viewer in the men’s separate lives.
Maxime’s relationship with his ex-alcoholic mother (Anne Dorval) is brilliantly realised, the anger bursting like a boil.
The meandering film often shows
a seedy side of Canada, which upends the usual cliches.
SHE Dies Tomorrow is a woozy, pretentious drama about a young woman who suddenly becomes convinced her end is nigh. Kate lyn Sheil plays Amy, who has a freakout which involves wandering around drunk in a silver evening dress, armed with a leafblower. She scopes out cremation urns online and considers having herself made into a leather jacket for posterity.
Soon Amy’s death paranoia infects everyone she meets, including her scientist friend Jane (Jane Adams), who studies mysterious microscopic viruses that loom luridly on the screen.
The American film was written and directed by Amy Seimetz long before coronavirus, and could do with a new ending.
Whole dinner parties of middleclass folk hallucinate that they’re doomed. All very self-indulgent.