A blow to the head

This is a review of Concussion (2013)

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26 May

This is a review of Concussion (2013)

* Contains spoilers *


Look, empty sex is better than no sex, right ?

Shelly [groupie] to Sandy Bates
(Stardust Memories (1980))

Advertising ! The most subtle form of which can be posters, those images (and words) that you take in, in passing, every time you go to the cinema – even on the way to the desk to buy a ticket for something else – is a huge part of cinema (for good or ill). Obviously, we know that the best star-rating will be chosen (even if the publication, say Good Housekeeping (or Gardener’s Weekly), then has to be credited in tiny and dark lettering), and the choicest praise :

So what do we make of an Internet-based reviewer having called Concussion (2013) 'like a feminised American Beauty' and being quoted ? Cynically, the reviewer may have hoped that, by alluding to the pretty famous collaboration between Sam Mendes and Kevin Spacey in that feature from 1999, there would be some interest in his words. However, not perhaps as if the film’s distributor cared (too much) about the relevance of the comparison when deciding to put them across the centre of the poster (with the film-title colour-highlighted), the resemblances hardly seem patent…

No rose-petals, only a momentary scene (in actual sleep after sex, not of someone luxuriating in those roses) that resembles Spacey’s (Lester Burnham’s) fantasies of said under-age Beauty* – and who, if Lester’s character has been feminized, is he in this film** ? Presumably, Robin Weigert (as Abby), though it is not immediately clear how, when she does not die, grooms no one, etc. (although it does fall out that she gets to sleep with someone whom she already thinks cute).

The reality of this film is that, as is so often the case, it may seem to look the other way in the face of the specific meaning of the medical term ‘concussion’ (even if that meaning may be different in the States, as with how ‘psychotic’ is used there to denote ‘psychopathic’ (so causing much misunderstanding here)). According to NHS Choices :

Concussion is the sudden but short-lived loss of mental function that occurs after a blow or other injury to the head. Concussion is the most common but least serious type of brain injury.

At the beginning of this film, Abby has not hit her head by falling off a bicycle, for example, but, at best, been hit by a ball that she did not see coming (and hit on the face just above the cheek). Who knows what that means to Stacie Passon, as the screenwriter, whereas the word is popularly used to characterize a symptom, and so Abby, after the event, describes the few days after her accident as hazy.

Nothing new, we learn, in her deciding to do up what her usual collaborator Justin calls a shit-hole (in the form of a loft in the city of New York, work on which she commutes in to supervise from Jersey), because she has done so half-a-dozen times before***. Suddenly, probably conveniently attributable to this concussion, she tells Justin (Johnathan Tchaikovsky (sic)) that she is unsure whether she should tell her partner Kate that she has slept with a prostitute (another woman) there : as he seems quite casual, which becomes readily apparent is true, there is no knowing whether confiding in him - rather than in one of her actual friends - is normal.

In any event, as if Abby did not have enough understanding of him to know how he would take what she says, Justin seems to know more about what the ground rules might be of her relationship with Kate (Julie Fain Lawrence) than Abby does herself, asking (not in these words) whether it is agreed that it is all right to stray in search of sex, or that it is agreed, but not to be talked about : Abby seems floored by the very question, not to mention momentarily so when he follows up, hearing how it had not even been that good for her, with his suggestion that she should try another woman whose details he has…

So begins a Nymphomaniac-(2013)-like slippery-slope slide into more and more of the same, for slimmer and slimmer reasons (the original one just evaporates)****. Or is it in homage to the aspects of boredom in Belle du Jour (1967) – although there is no real sense of a compulsive or addictive behaviour, let alone S&M ? In this respect, Concussion fits better with Jeune et Jolie (2013), though there the much younger protagonist Isabelle’s (Marine Vacth’s) motives remain deliberately opaque.

Abby’s homosexual version of what Isabelle embarks on begins with the useful fact that Justin is dating The Girl (Emily Kinney), and that she, both needing the money for law school, and having to conceal how she has got it for the same reason*****, has this undertaking that he just comes right out and mentions. Yet, apart from the fact that Jolie offers relatively little sense of danger in what Isabelle is about (whereas Abby clearly needs to veto ‘number five’ wishing to meet again), the set-up, and François Ozon’s direction of it, is otherwise unquestionably far more interesting :

Abby’s engagement with her ‘clients’, when it is not more like mothering or soft counselling, resembles – and even sometimes is – sex with friends. Yes, we like it that she is allowing herself something that she was lacking and needed, and there is that familiar model of ‘the tart with a heart’, but there is ever the sense that she is riding for some sort of fall, that she is a Walter Mitty without a happy landing.

For here, unlike Isabelle’s initial and ambiguous desire to get losing her virginity out of the way, the roots of what Abby does plainly lie in her partner : whilst Abby has little to do other than vacuum whilst reading a book (as if either would really get the necessary attention) and other things domestic, Kate seems, by contrast, far too focused on work, and other practicalities, even to think of intimacy.

Let alone desiring (or feeling the need for) sexual closeness / release (and, in that stereotype of the homosexual couple, Kate is portrayed as much more masculine than Abby (on which, more below)). It is this situation that – with almost no relation to the head injury (which must, chronologically, be some way ago, since Abby has had time to find, buy and start working on the property) – drives the opening move in the plot.

It also represents wanting something other than the (safe) functionality of her life : even an actual treadmill is there, in the hall, as a symbol of daily joining the regular group of women – putting themselves through it, with some fervour, on exercise-bikes, for Pilates, during the school-run... It’s almost a wonder that the Lou Reed track ‘Take a walk on the wild side’ was not used in the soundtrack, for the film cannot resist an excitable man at a party, who drapes himself over the stairs, quizzing Abby about how she first realized that she was a lesbian (as if, with his salaciousness, the moment has not arisen before – as if she, being so cheery about talking about it, would not have told him).

Yet, at the end of this film, it is as if Prospero thumps his staff, and declares Our revels now are ended, when Kate somehow gets access to the loft and surprises Abby there, naked and asleep. The space that Abby has created is no longer hers, and she may have stolen a frolic, but she is become a cringeing, guilty Caliban again, saying I’ll do anything you want. For, with a powerful family lawyer for a partner, and the risk of losing her part in their children’s lives, she knows that she is no better placed than when the trio who torment Malvoglio are caught, and she capitulates.


And we are left with that title Concussion, and what it was that writer / director Stacie Passon thought that this film was saying :

Or is it that concussion will be the couple’s unspoken excuse for Abby’s ‘aberrant’, ‘family-neglectful’ behaviour, which is in the past now – except that, as she alludes to, she will still see Sam around. Is that where she is Beauty’s Lester, that she dreams herself outside the humdrum, which she cannot ultimately avoid… ?


And there are now some speculations about the film's cinematic genesis - of a spoilery nature - here...


End-notes

* Although it is not a fantasy (other than on the part of the film-maker), and it is greeted, when witnessed, with some rather curt directions ‘to cover up’ (clever play on words, there, from someone prepared to forgive in return for some sort of forgetfulness : almost in the vein of, say, some bargain for life purposed by a Hardy character, which is not so much trivially selling a wife as securing her safe purchase !).

** Or is the feminization, at any rate, that the couple under strain is a lesbian one ? and what difference would it really have made, if it had not been, but Kate had been a man ?

*** Nothing exactly tells us when that last was, or why – except impliedly to be home for Maren and Micah (as, according to IMDb, the children are called) – she has not been undertaking this activity recently.

**** And self-destructively neglecting the school-run.

***** The privileged pragmatism of the legal practitioner : founding a career in a supposedly upright profession on the proceeds of crime...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)