Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Bad Behaviour: Incandescently smart
We are in Oregon, we are told.
Forty-something mother and recovering child-star Lucy is driving to a retreat where she and a dozen others will spend the week, listening at the feet of self-help guru Elon Bello.
Meanwhile, down here in Aotearoa, Lucy’s daughter Dylan is a stunt performer, employed on a hilariously tacky elvesand-goblins epic being filmed in Central Otago.
Local audiences will notice Lucy’s “Oregon” also looks a lot like New Zealand, and that might become a distraction for the first few minutes, but it will pass.
Bad Behaviour is explicitly a film of two halves. In the first, we focus almost exclusively on Lucy’s story, on how she came to think of herself as in need of Elon’s insights, and of the tragedy in her past that could now be derailing her.
Into the retreat comes Beverly. She is a model, influencer, DJ – and might be the woman who Lucy’s ex-husband is now dating. Interactions between Lucy and Beverly are fraught. Beverly seems to think that winning an argument is decided by how many people in the room feel sorry for you afterwards. While Lucy would outwardly prefer not to engage with Beverly at all, until they are thrown together with blackly comic and violent results.
Possibly orchestrating this carnage is Elon, played by Ben Whishaw as either an oblivious blank-canvas who actually believes his own impenetrably gnomic spiel, or a calculating charlatan exploiting this 21st century fag-end of the New Age movement for every last cent he can wring out of it.
M 107min Directed by Alice Englert ****
But then, just as I was mentally filing Bad Behaviour as a gleeful, but nicely nuanced satire of our solipsistic age, the second-part of the film arrives.
In Otago, Dylan is smitten by a hunky actor (he’s played by Marlon Williams, so that’s perfectly understandable) But, Dylan has her own demons that are coming out to play. And most of those demons seems to live in the places where Dylan keeps her relationship with her mum.
Dylan is played beautifully by Alice Englert, who is also the writer and director of Bad Behaviour.
With Lucy exploding on one side of the planet and Dylan imploding down here in New Zealand, clearly some outrageous contrivances are going to have to come into play, to get these two women into one room, to make sense of their relationships with each other and their pasts.
There were moments, watching the last 30 minutes or so of Bad Behaviour, when I wondered whether it was all a continuation of a nightmare that one of the women was having – and when the waking-up would arrive.
And yet, I remained engrossed and delighted by everything on-screen. As an excavation and reclamation of a relationship between a daughter and a mother, Bad Behaviour gets through the equivalent of an entire season of Better Things (And I love Better Things).
Also, Englert finds a terrific role for Beulah Koale (One Thousand Ropes), who is fantastic. And the cinematography is from Matt Henley, who also shot Coming Home In The Dark.
Bad Behaviour is wildly ambitious, often incandescently smart and proudly self-indulgent.
It will be polarising, but that’s a wonderful thing. I flat-out loved it. You can vehemently disagree. Elon would say that was fine.