A lifeless lack of feeling

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

20 September

* Contains spoilers *

Totem (2011) is a film of relatively few words, but it arguably has relatively little to say. I wish that it were like Ali Smith's novel The Accidental, but it is not.

Fiona has advertised herself as a maid, apparently through the Internet, and, although she calls her mother as if from a sea-side resort (perhaps she has claimed to be on holiday), she has claimed that both her parents are dead, and that she is 23, which she does not often look. The family make fun of her at first, but that seems to dissolve as a motif when she does a passable pretence at being Keith Jarrett in solo-piano mode.

Otherwise, Claudia shows her how to clean, pushes her around (literally) a few times, and Fiona mutters to herself, when no one is around, about how they do not clean properly and are pigs. Later, when she had seemed to be going, but did not, she talks to herself in the same way, but it sounds more Biblical, maybe Isaiah.

Apparently based on a true story, the write-up in Cambridge Film Festival's programme makes it sound more doomy and laden with meaning than it is, and it is hard to see what, in what unfolds, needs or is made any more relevant by a factual basis. Nothing does happen, and we wonder why the resources of a film needed to be devoted to what is the territory, at best, of a short story.


PS As I left, not wanting the embarrassment of the Q&A (but also having something else to do), I heard one couple saying how they had been trying to work out who the characters were in relation to each other, another firmly decided that it was a dysfunctional family, that beloved phrase of yore that means not a whit, which jut shows that some viewers will blame themselves for not following, and others put a label on it.


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