Arterton rescues not-so-great Escape
The most unusual thing about The Escape is that it isn’t in French. It’s easy to imagine this tale of a depressed housewife, who runs away from middle-class imprisonment to make a bid for sexual independence in Paris, as a minor vehicle for Kristin Scott Thomas a few years ago, or perhaps Emmanuelle Béart, whose freckled beauty this film’s actual star, Gemma Arterton, approximates.
Chamber pieces about marital unhappiness and the ennui of motherhood feel more typically a francophone preserve – while Arterton has even played a variation on literature’s most famous desperate housewife, in Anne Fontaine’s 2014 comedy-drama Gemma Bovery.
Watching her as Tara, a harassed mother-of-two on a Kent housing estate, is a very different proposition. While her husband, Mark (Dominic Cooper), suits up for a day’s office work, she runs the kids to school, does the shopping and laundry, and gazes at the identical rituals of other mums across the supermarket car park.
Something is not right – perhaps it never has been, in the years since she gave birth. Her husband clambers on her for morning sex, which she endures more than enjoys. And the children, played by real-life siblings, scream and squabble, spill things, and turn her face into a twitching mask of stress and dissatisfaction.
If the domestic routine here feels impressively believable, credit the improvised working methods of writer-director Dominic Savage (Love + Hate), who allows this couple to speak to each other without truly talking. It’s quite clear they’ve run out of things to discuss, other than what’s in the fridge, or who’s lacking drinks at a passive-aggressive weekend barbecue. An attempted date at an upscale restaurant is all empty gestures and conversational dead air. The sex scenes, without being at all graphic, are gruntingly frank: one ends with Arterton surreptitiously weeping, one hand tensed and poking out like a frozen starfish behind Cooper’s back. Mark is ordinary, oblivious, and has a temper, which flares up in moments that veer towards abuse, but usually checks itself before getting that far.
Like most people in the throes of mental illness, Tara has trouble finding a way out. Admitting her unhappiness to Mark, and to her mother (Frances Barber) is a start. She wants to enrol in art school, but Mark baulks at the cost. And so, in despair, she makes a run for it, booking a one-way ticket on the Eurostar and switching off her phone. In a moment, the smiling family snapshot has dimmed, and a dull black mirror reflects her guilty face back.
The Paris scenes are the film’s weakest, perhaps partly because they’re its briefest. Like Tara, this script has the urge to bail on its opening set-up, but doesn’t know what to do once it’s overboard.
Having established Tara’s gloom so well as a dramatic problem, Savage has only cosmetic, half-hearted solutions to offer her. Even if there’s meant to be no easy fix, this isn’t a hugely profound point to make. And some visual ideas are too pleased with themselves, such as Tara sitting on a child’s swing while the camera lingers on the chains above her – chained! – and the scattered Lego bricks across their carpet – broken home! – when she walks out.
For all The Escape’s weaknesses, it’s held together with real sinew by Arterton, who lives and breathes the stifling air of Tara’s habitat without needing to act up a storm at any point. Her performance justifies the whole project, with a sure hand from the director coaxing her through it. After this audition tape, she can move on to whichever Anna Karenina or Hedda Gabler she damn well pleases.
For all The Escape’s weaknesses, it’s held together with real sinew by Arterton