A talented cast is squandered in this witless Britflick
Film
Eternal Beauty 15 cert, 94 min
★★ ★★★
Dir Craig Roberts
Starring Sally Hawkins, David Thewlis, Billie Piper, Penelope Wilton, Alice Lowe, Morfydd Clark, Robert Pugh
Eternal Beauty is full of extremely talented people not quite sure what they’re doing. This dark comedy about depression cycles through an awful lot of tones and gimmicks. It’s as apt to remind you of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers or Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as anything strictly funny – ambitious reference points, at the very least, for its young writer-director Craig Roberts, best known for his lead role in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine (2010).
Roberts made his directing debut at 24 with the coming-of-age flick Just Jim (2015), and here rolls his sleeves up with a close-to-impossible assignment: giving us a brightly coloured indie take on paranoid schizophrenia. He’s also wrangling a substantial cast, with an especially big ask of a lead performance from Sally Hawkins – an actress it’s hard not to root for, even when every successive scene that might get you raising a rallying fist is then prone to make you helplessly gnaw on it.
She’s Jane, a hopeless spinster who has never got over being jilted at the altar – a trauma from practically another life, which we experience with Morfydd Clark as her younger self. She has sunk ever since into gibberish and monotony, with next-to-no support from her baffled and selfish family, except her married sister Alice (Alice Lowe), who at least tries her best. They have a benign enough dad (Robert Pugh) who never combats their mother (Penelope Wilton), a cruel matriarch who blatantly favours another sister (Billie Piper), a beauty queen looking for her escape.
The film was shot in Wales but doesn’t appear to be set there – it’s based in a sort of default miserableBritish-indie-suburbia, where the fixed-to-the-wall landlines and chunky TV sets seem to locate it in an equally unspecific Eightiesish era of general glumness. For a lackadaisical half-hour in the middle, David Thewlis pops up as Mike, a hipster musician in a Trilby and Converse, who tries to put the moves on Jane. When she relents, the film turns for a spell into its strained equivalent of PT Anderson’s Punch-drunk Love – a sort of redemptive amour-fou duet with bouncily lyrical score to boot. But the gaudy bubble soon bursts.
The main impression here is of Roberts trying various gambits out until breaking point, and foisting some unfortunately comic notions of mental illness – well-intended as they surely are – upon an antic, all-stopsout Hawkins.
The film simply tries to do too much – a more honourable crime than trying too little, but the subject here needs a persuasive tone and confident execution that doesn’t seem just to borrow snippets from every psychodrama on the list. You can dress a film up like an edgy comedy on dead-serious themes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was crying out to be one.