Archipelago

Joanna Hogg's 2010 Archipelago is, perhaps, best understood as an experimental film.  Hogg's picture tests the proposition that a film can convey great depth of emotion through a series of largely static still life images.  I don't think the movie is successful -- it's simply too constricted and perversely uncommunicative for my taste.  The film shows us anomie, but we never quite know what is behind that anomie.  Nonetheless, the movie is remarkably beautiful pictorially and probably discloses on big screen different dimensions invisible on DVD shown on television.  The film is so austere and resolutely uncommercial that I doubt that many will have an opportunity to watch this picture in the format for which it was intended.

In some ways, Archipelago resembles one of Mike Leigh's "slice of life" pictures, however, refined into something that is almost mathematical in its purity.  A number of scenes are potentially humorous -- Hogg's feckless protagonists are a bit like Leigh's campers or demoralized suburbanites -- but the film's icy mise-en-scene cancels any sense of fun -- we register that scenes could be funny, but they are abstract to the point that we can't laugh.  A middle-aged woman (Patricia) and her bitter daughter, Cynthia, have rented a roomy cottage on one of the Scilly Islands.  At first, we are puzzled as to where the film takes place -- the landscapes are remarkably varied:  stony heath, turbulent harbors, hillsides with majestic trees and, even, some scenes that show palms and even cacti.  The woman's husband and the paterfamilias doesn't show up -- he's detained somewhere and his absence contributes to the growing tension among the principals.  Ultimately, I concluded that the unseen father and husband is separated from his wife and, perhaps, involved in an affair with someone else -- but the film is so laconic this can't be exactly deciphered from what we see.  The son, Edward, appears, arriving majestically by helicopter.  Edward is played by Tom Hiddleston before he became famous in cartoon American films and here he is a shy pre-Raphaelite beauty.  The family has hired Rose, a cook, to prepare meals for them -- she's a robust blonde who seems positioned to be Edward's love-interest.  But Edward is too morose to do more than take walks with her and moon around the kitchen when she is preparing meals.  (Late in the film, he pins a brooch on her shoulder that has fallen off Rose's sweater -- this is the closest the film comes to anything like intimacy and Rose seems pretty uncomfortable when he touches her in this way.  I recall a farce called No sex please:  we're English which pretty much explains the situation in the movie.)  The family has also hired a landscape artist named George to provide painting lessons -- as with Rose, he is positioned as a love-interest (for either Patricia, the unhappy mother, or Cynthia, the equally miserable daughter) but nothing really develops.  In fact, he may be homosexual and more interested in Edward.

Nothing of any dramatic significance occurs in the movie.  There is a lot of wind and rain.  We get a mini-discourse on the sex of lobsters, something discussed by a fisherman with Rose, and, then, she and Edward talk about the most humane way to prepare the creatures for the table -- it's moot to Edward because he is a vegetarian. (The scene reminded me of the funny sequence in Annie Hall when Woody Allen tries to cook a lobster for Diane Keaton, but the reference is frivolous because there's nothing really funny about Rose's sad statement that gradually increasing the heat on the lobsters puts "them into a coma" -- possibly a comment about the disaffected and morose way in which the characters in Archipelago interact.)  Later, Rose plucks and cooks a couple pheasants ("a brace") and, predictably, Cynthia bites down on shot and wounds her mouth. In the end, Patricia has a fight with her husband on the telephone -- but it's all off-stage and we can't exactly hear anything but the hysterical tone of her voice.  Edward is planning to spend 11 months in Africa teaching the people there about safe-sex -- how to avoid AIDS.  (What he knows about sex of any kind is unclear.)  The artist delivers some pronouncements as to art which might be taken as programmatic to the film's themes -- he argues that colors can never be seen in isolation but only in relationship to one another.  There's a gloomy picnic, a trip to restaurant that deteriorates into browbeating the poor chef, much strolling and bike-riding in bad weather, and, at last, Edward departs on a helicopter that is by far the loudest thing in the film -- the soundtrack is entirely non-diegetic, simply wind blowing and surf pounding on the shore and ubiquitous bird calls and bird song.

The movie is visually stunning -- a symphony of subtle greys and greens.  Hogg's master is obviously Ozu, although her domestic drama is much, much less demonstrative.  The film employs many zen-like empty frames -- shots of rooms after people have left them, landscapes from which the figures have departed, and, most notably, a series of shots showing bicycles parked in the courtyard of the cottage, communicating to us who is at home.  The interior shots also invoke Ozu, including a repeated image of a stairwell that is all vertical steps and thresholds.  The film is so refined that is almost non-existent.  The title Archipelago suggests that the characters are all isolated, islands that can't make contact set in a foaming, destructive sea.  Everyone seems bitter in this film except for Rose and the artist, George.  But the family members are well-off people able to afford a splendid cottage in a beautiful place.  So the petty misery of the characters is a wee bit off-putting.  And since Hogg is reticent about what is bothering them -- she seems to take simmering discontent as the default emotion in human life -- we can't really form any conclusions about their state of affairs.