More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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24 August
This is a review of Shadow Dancer (2012)
* Contains some spoilers *
They say that it takes two to tango, but does it?
At any rate, in Shadow Dancer (2012), anti-terrorist agent Mac (Clive Owen, who also has the code-name of Declan) and Collette McVeigh* (Andrea Risebrough, who also seems to get called Cat and C'lette by family and others) seem to have something in common: neither seems quite at home with where they are, Mac within his team (and, as with so many other figures before him, he has his own internal tout or squealer to lean on), and Collette, looking very out of place both at Brendan's funeral and at her mother's house, which is where she lives with her son Mark (we do not know Mark's father or what, if anything, happened to him).
The film is set in 1993, but we have seen the death of Collette's kid brother Sean twenty years before, and there are other deaths or attempted killings in this present - having seen Collette send her brother out to buy fags for their father, because she wants to play with making necklaces, we know something of the background to what happened to her. If it is meant to be a surprise that she is trying to plant a bomb on the Underground, then it is not, but we know very little about what else she has done, except presumably that she blamed her brother's death on a unionist terror-group or the British Army.
She is caught and apparently talked into being an informer, but she seems so awkward at explaining what happened to her in London that it seems unlikely that she would convince Kevin Mulville (David Wilmot), who wants to know (and who does not seem consistently mentally alive as a villain). Maybe being caught and put under pressure is a new situation for Collette, but it seems hard to believe that Mac has not before been in a position where the information that his plant is passing on, if acted on, could implicate or threaten him or her, which, here, he seems to care about, and, which is the way with films, as if anew.
That said, Owen delivers a very polished and unforced performance (but only billed in the closing credits as 'with', for some reason), and seems to be - more or less - in control until the end. Yet what I envisaged would happen does, and we are left wondering how it could not have been foreseen (by him), given the choice that he gave someone close to Collette, when it was highly likely that he or she would do as we see. Besides which, his putting of that choice leads him off the end of the plank with his colleagues, and Mac's position is then untenable.
However, it was regrettable that the little homage, obviously inspired by having Gillian Anderson on the crew (and I did not realize, until afterwards, that it was she) as Mac's boss Kate, to agents standing significantly in a field of a backlit golden crop, X-Files style, is chosen as the medium for making known what happened to the other tout. The agents are even dressed in that fashion: or are we meant to believe that their screen counterparts (the first series began this year) have inspired them to copy?
We are left by this film, as we are at the beginning, by Collette's face**, calmly and carefully photographed as thoughts and feelings pass over it, but we know now that they may be unknown to us: we do, though, know what has just happened.
The implication is that whatever we thought that we might have known about her, we did not, and there are obvious parallels with Jovovich's title character from Salt (2010), except that it is a far inferior film whose plot does not remotely fit together, and this one, by Tom Bradby from his novel, very nearly does (even if, at first sight, there are doubts about it***).
There is one scene between Collette and Mac that, however, defies belief except as an attempt to subvert one's expectations (even if hinted at by Anderson), and which the film / plot is the weaker for. Nothing hangs on it, except that Owen only posed the choice that he did because of it, and could only do so because he delved where he should not have done. Oh, and how likely is it, that, when Mac knows all that he does about all those with whom Collette is involved, this important detail could simply have been kept from him?
The question of who is expendable is, as ever, the name of the game - and, if you can run with it uncritically***, there is plenty of scope for finding people who seek to be the sacrificial victim, not least when Mulville turns his unwelcome attention on Domnhall Gleeson, playing Collette's brother Conor. Fine for him to torture his own, but he seems too sinister, less matter of fact, for my liking, as if a villain trying to get detail from Commander Bond... Maybe there were some such individuals for whom power and giving pain were something that attracted them in the IRA or the like, but there is too much of a feel of the extraordinary, when more solid
As I am suggesting, although Tom Bradby apparently had experience of this period as a correspondent in Ireland, the story ultimately seems too much like a typical agent /double agent / triple agent motif transported to that world, and did not seem to sit happily there. For, yes, betrayals, pacts and sacrifices were, of course, part of that world during what euphemistically got called the troubles, but this is not a film with the finesse of Tinker Tailor, and gets a little too close to a few rather too unusual individuals to tell a really convincing overall story.
Just take the ending, for example: whatever Collette tells Mark, he and she are in the aftermath of an event whose severe consequences they will be hard pressed to escape - even if they are (which they might not be) with greater resources than just their own - and are also clouded by evidence of her past, which has not simply disappeared. Risebrough, too, has made a choice about her son's and her survival, but it is far from clear that it will pay off, or pay off for long.
More now : Collette revisited (thanks to @dannytheleigh)
End-notes
* The poster says Collette - I rather think that IMDb is wrong and has misled me with the spelling 'Colette'.
** It seems that Risebrough is thirty, but she has the type of face that can look very different at different times, and, unfortunately, does, such that she seems too young to have been seven or so in 1973 much of the time, and only occasionally looks old enough: her face also transforms dramatically with a smile, and smiles are rare here.
*** I say that this film would not hang together, from start to finish, if you have seen it and know the ending.
