Film Carew

In Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Ploy, the filmmaker takes one familiar filmic device - a character suddenly wakes up, and an audience realises that what they've been watching is actually a dream - and turns it into a formalist exercise of inspired overuse. Nearly beginning each scene with a character waking up, Ratanaruang creates a film that never returns to the 'real'; not so much a tale of dreams-within-dreams, but a commentary on the falsity of cinema, and the essential unreality of modern life. Danny Boyle is trying to do something similar with Trance, but, well, no one can ever mistake him for a formalist. Boyle is a born maximalist, one of the guiltiest proponents of the new-millennial cinema of overdirection; his films a barrage of busy edits and cameras stuck in crazy places and digital colour correction gone bananas, with pounding Big Beat scores and sprays of montage making his take on cinema one synonymous with the visual language of advertising and pop-music promos. All the worst elements he showed in 127 Hours - where his idea of working 'around' the fact that the film was about one dude stuck in a cave was to trip into endless fantasy sequences that didn't just look like ads, but actually were ads; because nothing says heroic-tale-of-animalistic-human-survival quite like excessive product placement - have been turned loose on Trance, a film that is, effectively, one long fantasy sequence; and whose direction may be the most Boyley thing cinema has ever seen.

The plot - lifted from a 2001 telemovie of the same name, and fed steroids by old Boyle screenwriting hand John Hodge - is an insane labyrinth of convoluted and contradictory and confusing double-cum-triple-cum-quadruple-etc-crosses. But, basically, it goes like this: tiny James McAvoy - sporting a pair of fluffy, patchy red sideburns that clash with his haircut endlessly - plays an auction-house handler who has conspired with Vincent Cassel and his rag-tag gang of Benetton Rainbow crooks to filch a priceless Goya painting. In the heist scene mayhem, he's struck a traumatic blow to the head, suffers mild amnesia, and can't remember where he stashed the painting. So, Cassel recruits a hypnotherapist, Rosario Dawson, to help our would-be 'hero' uncover his lost memories. Meaning: there are endless scenes where Dawson lulls McAvoy into a trance, and the film pirouettes into the unreal, lost somewhere between the subconscious and an over-reliance on shallow focus. Like Ploy, the film plays with these devices so much that the line between reality and fantasy is completely obliterated; each time McAvoy rubs his head or wakes up hungover or comes out of a trance showing Boyle beavering away at creating a state of confusion in viewers that lasts through the whole film. Visually, this means he and longtime DP Anthony Dod Mantle go wacky with woozy POV shots, point the camera through water and perspex and wrapping paper and petrol-sloshed windows, stagger an endless mosaic of reflections off windows and mirrors and fishtanks and any available hard surface, add post-hoc digital lens flare with gay abandon, buzz in CTV and lo-res digital vid, and abuse colour to eyesore extremes: Dawson living in an apartment festooned with orange neon lights in one half, blue in the other; a rooftop scene with McAvoy gettin' wa-hey crazy coming saturated in dark-room red; the streets of London the deep crimson of cut arteries; a field of sunflowers in Southern France looking like it's borrowed its colour palette from Ms. Pac-Man.

Trance is imagined as of modernisation of the noir film, and it leans heavily on Steven Soderbergh's modernist takes on noir. But where Soderbergh can use colour and camera for moments of genuine thrill or shock - suddenly seeing 21st-century Floridian strippers through the lens of early-20th-century German Expressionism - Boyle doesn't have the proper filmmaking chops to fall back on; his film so constantly trolling for thrill or shock that all its warped visuals and bleeding light and dayglo colours become a sodden mess, regurgitating the colour-noir bit of The Underneath in so much visual vomit. All this hyper-saturated colour is, really, just Boyle being Boyle, making things as big and gimmicky and over-the-top as possible; the fact that he once won a fucking Oscar only reasserting the fact. Trance is such a work of extremism - so the culmination of this particular filmmaking bag - that it probably needs its own stylistic name; let's call it Digital Ultra. Boyle is such an evangelist of new technologies that they're not just the very centre of his stylistic tics, but - in phone, tablet, and flat-screen form - a constant presence in the world of the film itself. There's an amazing moment where Dawson leads McAvoy into a place nestled deep in his subconscious, where he can literally open his hidden memories. And, when he unwraps this symbolic package, he finds an iPad. In another, better film, it'd be an amazing satire on how humans have outsourced the job of remembering shit to their computers - it the place for contacts, phone-numbers, diaries, Wikipedia's endless answers - but, here, you just get the feeling that Boyle thinks touch-screens look really cool; they being glorious, glittering symbols of Digital Ultra.

Just as its jarring look is so constantly In Your Face as to near parody the '90s-youth-culture milieu from which Boyle arose, Trance's own cleverness is so incessantly shaken that you get inured to its various flip-flopping tricks; the pic pointing out its own subterfuge so much that its sense of slippery, subconscious-trippin' sophistication is unearned. The second-hand recycling of Nolan misdirections (the spectre of Following, Memento, The Prestige, and, especially, Inception persists throughout) has no elegance; Trance essentially succeeding at its attempted state of sustained confusion by being nonsensical. Where The Prestige made artful its parallel between the magician's sleight-of-hand and the filmmaker's suspension-of-disbelief, here the symbolism is not artful at all, just bombastic, Boylean. Dawson is verily a proxy for the director, the narrator who steps in and controls the narrative, leading the “extremely suggestable” subjects - aka: the audience - into places of her own making, places they may not wish to go. But when the film starts peeling back its onion-layers of manifold reveals, and Dawson clearly becomes the protagonist of the picture, the insanely-convoluted nature of the script - and its playing-with-memory/erasing-memory trance states - makes the comparison between director and character all the more trenchant: as meddling, Machiavellian hypnotist, Dawson's schemes are so baffling and wacky that she truly suits as stand-in for Boyle.

Dawson's character has obviously been written as a modernised, new-millennial take on the femme fatale. And, initially, there is a genuine joy to be had in the way this dame arrives and takes hold of the film; going from, seemingly, a telegraphed love-interest due to end up being used as bait, to a woman out to get hers; with McAvoy flipped from ostensible hero to damsel-in-distress, his fate in the hands of said femme. Trance has already turned several turns before Dawson enters the frame, but its true (d)evolutionary developments come with her grabbing proceedings in her own grasp, which so shake the film from the expected that her very presence promises the pic won't ever proceed like your plodding, predictable procedural. As someone who finds all genre films tedious, any narrative that so obnoxiously disregards standard screenplay structures is welcome to these tired eyes. Yet, the more reveals, reversals, and revelations Trance stages, the more incoherent the flick gets; both narratively and philosophically. If Dawson initially appears as empowered agent of her own destiny - as possible feminist figure - she soon just becomes a victim; a beaten housewife whose elaborate schemes involve her sleeping with the man who once terrorised her life and putting herself in the position to be raped. It's a male cinematic take on feminism: with women having to use sex to get what they want and being forever the victims of violence (“violated by memory”), but patriarchy getting theoretically taken down because one guy gets shot in the cock. There's also a whole weird narrative thread where the standard porn-derived modern male desire for a shaved cunt is justified by connecting it to pre-Raphaelite painting, and McAvoy gawps at Dawson's freshly-shorn mons pubis as if in thrall to the contents of the Pulp Fiction briefcase. In the middle of an oft-baffling mess, it's possibly the picture's most bizarre motif; but, ultimately, it's just another confusing moment in a film whose state-of-confusion feels confused. Trance may ask the big questions - “what is a person?” Dawson literally says out loud, at one point - but lord help you if you're coming to it for actual answers.

The film about the-guy-around-30-who's-wondering-if-he-should-settle-down-with-his-long-time-girlfriend is one of yr old pal Film Carew's least favourite rom-com angles; and when it comes in a film written and starring and directed by a stand-up comedian, well, cold shivers go down my spine. Yet, Sleepwalk With Me carves out a nice-enough, non-threatening, actually-not-particularly offensive place in this American Indie Comedy realm; with Mike Birbiglia adapting his one-man based-on-my-own-life-experiences standup show into a narrative feature. Here, he recounts his adult life with his long-suffering girlfriend (Lauren Ambrose, adding plenty of grace to a role that could've been done much more direly), his battles with a sleepwalking disorder that bordered on dangerous, and his career rise as stand-up comic. There's the usual zany parents and neuroses, but the screenplay - penned by Birbiglia and ol' pal Ira Glass of This American Life - has a framing-narrative device that manages to make its leaps back and forth in time, into and out of dream-sequences, all get strung along like a charming anecdote. Birbiglia tells the story to-camera, from a years-later place, and that gives him a perspective that adds to the narrative. Rather than inhabiting that kind-of-obnoxious, Apatovian manchild place, he's looking back on it, with regret and some cringing and a confession that, yeah, he was a bit of a dick.

Chasing Ice chases after James Balog, the wildlife/wilderness photographer who enacted the visionary Extreme Ice Survey, a visual record of retreating glaciers in the Arctic. Glaciers are beautifully summarised, herein, as climate change's “canary in the coalmine”, the vulnerable frontline reading whose ill-fortune serves as greater harbinger. The end results - time-lapse photography montages that serve incontrovertible, terrible proof of the radical pace of environmental change - have been reduced to short, sharp, snappy pieces of persuasive powerpoint propaganda, but Jeff Orlowski's documentary tracks way back to see how they were all made; the first-time filmmaker having started his involvement with the project in a literal documenting sense, there as record-keeping videographer, not feature filmmaker. His eventual feature features a dreamer dreaming up big dreams, fighting the world's lack of urgency with a driven man-on-a-mission mission that borders on monomaniacal; this the story of Balog as man, myth, legend. From there, it unfolds into a greater discussion of climate change, and the idiocy of the American media's insistence on making it a political debate, as if sides can be taken in the face of the inevitable.