Trance

Danny Boyle is obviously a very talented person - Slumdog Millionaire is one of my all time favourite films, the Olympic opening ceremony was an outstanding success, and Trainspotting is an iconic and disturbing, but very memorable film. Something seems to have gone wrong with this one though, because it seems to have missed the mark quite widely.

As for the story, it gets itself mixed up in numerous plot twists as an auctioneer takes part in stealing a painting that is on sale at his own auction, but then forgets what he had done with it when he gets hit on the head - and his accomplices come looking for it with menaces. It eventually transpires that he is double crossed by a hypnotist with whom he has had a previous relationship, but who has hypnotised him to forget it. In some ways it's too complicated for words, but it's a good enough story that could have worked well with, dare I say it, someone like Alfred Hitchcock directing.

The big problem for me though is that it is all very cold and steely, the characters all being driven by greed for greed's sake with no feeling or regard for anything else. It is set in London, but it reminds me of the London of the late 1980's when i lived there, a very cold, heartless and cruel place with people scrambling around to make themselves look glamorous and "with it" and trampling everyone down in front of them who isn't of the same mindset. I hear say that Danny Boyle is a socialist and so maybe this is all intended by him; a commentary perhaps on the cruel heartless society he sees as being started by Margaret Thatcher. Maybe so, or maybe I am reading too much into it - in any case it made for a feeling of cold cruel efficiency and technology and was not something that I enjoyed seeing on a Sunday afternoon.

A couple of weeks ago I went to see "Timothy Green" in preference to this film - I made the right choice by far and would probably have been better advised to have had an afternoon in today.  

21.04.13