A bird with its wings clipped
Despite promising cast, Aloft never manages to get airborne
Aloft stars out of 5 Starring: Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, Mélanie Laurent Directed by: Claudia Llosa Running time: 112 minutes
Aloft, the English-language film debut of Peru’s Claudia Llosa (The Milk of Sorrow), slouches toward a few Canadian cinemas more than a year after its première at the 2014 Berlin film festival, and two years after being filmed in rural Manitoba. Given its leitmotif of falcons in flight, one might expect a more soaring entrance, but the film’s obtuse plotting grounds any such description.
Jennifer Connelly stars as Nana, a farm worker in an unnamed, far-from-anywhere locale. The opening scene finds her helping a sow give birth. Next, overcome by animal passions, she’s having rough, barnyard sex with a co-worker.
But the story really begins when she takes her two young sons and one’s pet falcon to visit a faith healer (William Shimell, so perfect in Certified Copy a few years back). The falcon upsets whatever natural balance the shaman is trying to construct, but in the aftermath Nana learns she might have healing powers of her own.
Before we can really wrap our heads around all this, however, the action jumps forward 20 years. One son, Ivan (no sign of the other ... hmm), has grown into Cillian Murphy, maintaining his love of falconry, but now pursued by a shifty francophone journalist (Mélanie Laurent), looking to do a documentary about him.
Ivan is nursing a sense of guilt and anger over parental abandonment, which makes him grumpy and withdrawn. In fact, just about everyone in the film seems to be in a state of perpetual unhappiness. If one of them would step up and give a reason, we might have more reason to sympathize with someone ... anyone.
The story, such as it is, comes together in an even more remote Arctic location where Nana has reluctantly decided to try out her powers. But it feels like a novel with missing pages — you can follow the plot and get a sense of tone, but key details seem to have fallen away and need to be reconstructed or imagined.
That’s a lot of work for the viewer, and not much in the way of payoff.