The
recent appearance of Trishna in cinemas marked the
prolific British director Michael Winterbottom’s nineteenth
cinematic release since his feature debut Butterfly Kiss in
1995. Even Woody Allen can’t boast more than one
film a year. Just one from the Winterbottom back catalogue film – I
Want You – has yet to receive a UK commercial
DVD release, but it’s one worth tracking down.
In
making I Want You, Winterbottom chose to explore the
lives of people living on the margins of society by depositing his
characters in a drab seaside resort, a location that acts as a thin
film separating two states of being. Although a relatively simplistic
story and one that arguably fails to fully realise its themes, I
Want You starkly places its action directly in this
diaphanous realm between solid and liquid elements. Daytime exterior
shots of the beach and promenade at the fictional Farhaven (the film
was shot in Hastings and Dungeness) are bathed in an unnatural
sulfurous yellow light, giving the locale a purgatorial complexion,
one reminiscent of aspic or amber in which the characters are
trapped. An early parallel between fossils hewn from the local rocks
and the predicament of Farhaven’s inhabitants encased in its
resinous margin emphasizes this.
There
are numerous analogies of otherness and separation to be found;
characters possess a broad mix of accents, including Irish and
Scottish, suggesting much regional and national displacement to
Farhaven. Honda (Luke Petrusic), a young Eastern European immigrant,
and his older sister Smokey (Labina Mitevska) inhabit a
dilapidated beach house set apart from the town. Smokey exercises her
Catholicism and her sexual appetite with equal fervour, forging her
energies as a nightclub singer on the isolation of the stage,
enveloped in an otherworldly, blue aquatic light. Honda has been
rendered mute by the death of his parents and attempts to make
contact with the world with an array of listening devices and
recording equipment. It is as though he is holding an ear up to the
thin barrier that separates him from the world; at one point he uses
an electronic ear to penetrate the fly-specked windscreen of a car
and hear its occupants, at another he is pressed against the thick
glass in an aquarium attempting to detect the sounds of the creatures
on the other side of the thickened glass. He even sticks microphones
to a beachfront apartment window in order to listen to the
conversation within, a metaphorical identification, acknowledgement
and attempted penetration of the dividing ‘skin’. Several brief
distorted replays of earlier scenes seen from the point of view of
Honda’s mind’s eye punctuate the film, seemingly shot through a
thickened, gelated lens to further emphasize the clotted, hermetic
nature of Farhaven.
Honda
forms a platonic relationship with Helen (Rachel Weisz), a more
mature local hairdresser and central player in the film’s
concurrent plot thread. Beyond his initial innocent infatuation with
her, Honda’s bond of fellowship with Helen is founded around their
shared otherness as orphans. Helen herself exists on the fringes of
Farhaven, stigmatized by her involvement in the murder of her father.
Martin (Alessandro Nivola), being the man convicted of the murder, is
also regarded as Other. He reenters the cataract of Farhaven at the
film’s outset and proceeds to obsessively stalk Helen, his former
lover. He is psychologically damaged by his term of imprisonment and
returns seeking a tangled combination of revenge and redemption from
Helen for taking the blame and serving time for the murder that she
in fact committed. Their first onscreen encounter upon his return
sees Martin save Helen from an attempted rape outside the nightclub
on Farhaven’s pier, a moment that graphically revisits some of the
themes associated with the pier in Brighton Rock (John
Boulting 1947). At night the pier becomes the penetrative causeway
audaciously conjoining solid with liquid and is territorialized by
predatory sexual forces afforded a right to roam by its permissive,
transitional corridor.
Although
flawed, I Want You makes for an interesting,
eclectic viewing experience. Until Polygram see fit to give it a UK
DVD release (they did put it out on video in 1999) you will have to
look out for import discs, but it’s worth seeing a good quality
copy in order to best appreciate its vivid palette of colours.
Jez Conolly
