"Love. Or nothing." That's the tagline for this Belgian romantic dark drama, which features a sort of perverse Romeo & Juliet love tragedy. Paul, a twelve-year-old boy, lives with his mother in the woods next to a psychiatric hospital she runs. Hauntingly isolated, the location seems the setting for a fairytale or horror movie; Paul is forbidden contact with the patients of the hospital and so hungers for meaningful interaction with anyone other than his somewhat domineering mother. He spends his time wandering the woods until, one day, he saves a trapped and injured bird that he adopts and nurses to health. Its sudden death drives a violent wedge between son and mother, the unsympathetic and cruel attitude of the latter suggesting she may have killed the bird.
Enter the non-symbolic bird, Gloria, whose presence in the ward catalyzes an awakening for Paul. Her free spirit and beauty suggest to him that she is not ill, and the two develop a flirtatious, secret friendship that seems innocent enough at first. As it grows to an obsessive affection, Gloria reveals her suspicions that her uncle has committed her to the asylum in order to claim her deceased parents' money for himself. The two actors are wonderfully talented, much more so than I expected from the minimalist dialogue they are given; they are dressed in contrasting colors, Gloria in red and Paul in pale blue that they never change out of. Gloria convinces Paul to help her escape, but she kills his mother before they are forced to flee into the wilderness. It's not unlike Badlands, actually, and more than a few visuals seem inspired by Terrence Malick.
In this way, the story becomes a picaresque, that is, something between Huckleberry Finn and Bonnie & Clyde. After the intriguing and exciting first act, setting up conflict and romance, the film devolves into strange episodes of interactions as Gloria and Paul flee civilization and meet people who could help them or report them. It's not really "about" who they were or the realities of their situation, so their introductions are never revisited and exposition never given; it's about whether or not they'll survive in the wide world, or if they are even able to exist in nature. The two children -- because they are children, it's easy to forget -- are doomed, of course, and so the remainder of the film feels like a strung-along mess of coming-of-age and romantic tragedy. The former tends to work well while the latter does not. I can accept children caught in the throes of youthful love, and even experimenting sexually, but the extent of sexual behavior felt more exploitative here than thematic. I did not need to see Gloria masturbating Paul in the forest to understand that these pre-teens were expressing their "adoration" physically.
Perhaps my problem with this isn't in the material itself, but in the fairytale way it's presented. Soft amber light warms each frame of the 16mm cinematography, and we are intensely attuned to nature as an erotic, even ethereal backdrop to the story. As their canoe floats down the river, fog rolls in under streams of indirect sunlight, and the romantic music makes things feel delightful; it's only in cognitive awareness of context that it's actually a shot that belongs in a thriller or horror movie. Likewise, the handheld camera that alternates between severe close-ups of the kids and wide, landscape shots raises questions about the nature of intimacy between characters and between the kids and nature. Director and writer Fabrice du Welz's control of atmosphere is without dispute; his control of narrative and theme is tenuous at best. In delivery, the film forces us into the headspace of its characters, not into acknowledging that none of this is okay.
Which is fine, really, and feels the opposite of emotionally manipulative despite the heavy-handed work being done. But whereas Queen & Slim, for example, beautifully balances these same elements with riveting contemporary relevance, Adoration feels like a well-planned production that doesn't know its audience, doesn't know its own themes, and can't decide what genre to emphasize. It doesn't help that the film's clear area of potential relevance -- mental illness, indicated by Gloria's diagnosed schizophrenia -- is treated with such distance and apparent indifference. Sure, she becomes increasingly paranoid and violent off her meds, but it's treated by the film as just another element of nature the two kids must navigate on their destination-less path. Evading genre would even be an option, but this one swings widely from one to another instead of combining ideas into manageable narrative or aesthetic moves. That would be assuming that the narrative even has distinct moves; after the first act, I barely remember the film's story because du Welz's screenplay fizzles out into obscurity and anticlimax.
No comments:
Post a Comment