Exhibition

Dir: Joanna Hogg

2014

*

Why do governments still use waterboarding as a form of interrogation technique when they could easily just sit the interrogatee in front of a Joanna Hogg film? I know that might sound harsh but the two things you don’t mess with are people’s time and people’s money – Hogg has messed with both of mine. Her boring exploration of the uninteresting middle-class continues in Exhibition as we follow artist couple D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) as they sell their beloved house. The couple are uncommunicative with one another, H is an architect and D is some kind of artist (it is never made clear), we never see their work and their work is never discussed. In fact, part of the story (if you can call it a story) is that D refuses to discuss her own work with her husband H, much to his (and our) annoyance. There is an awful lot of looking out of windows, half conversations and murmuring. As the couple get closer to the sale of their house, the more anxious they become. Their relationship is up and down, sometimes they argue, some times they have sex but most of the time they spend time in different rooms from one another. The appearance of Tom Hiddleston as the higher-class estate agent doesn’t bring much to the film, he’s fine but it highlights that the others are non-actors and that Hogg has a few famous (and talented) friends she can call for favours. I’m not going to criticize Viv Albertine because I’m a big Slits fan and actually, her and Liam Gillick are both good in their performances, I just don’t like their characters of how they are written. Hogg once said of her debut film that "I wanted to make a film doing everything I was told not to do in television." I’m all for breaking the rules, but when the outcome isn’t that interesting you should try something new. However, for some reason I can’t get my head around, Hogg’s films have received high praise from critics. Exhibition received five stars in the The Guardian as it hailed it as 'a masterful cinematic enigma'. Her work: the depiction of unarguably middle-class characters, has prompted some commentators to see her work as spearheading a new type of social realism in British film. She really does have a lot of friends it seems. Her film’s are like watching The Office but without any comedy. Hogg has said that she is influenced by directors such as Eric Rohmer and Yasujirō Ozu but I can’t see the comparison. The people who seem to like her films the most are the dreadful people she seems to be making films about. Rohmer and Ozu produced amazing social commentaries on selected people from different times and places, here, Hogg has painted a vague picture of people who I don’t think exist and who, essentially, don’t really matter. The continues theme (or question if you will) throughout the film is ‘Why should I care?’. There is nothing to relate to, to suggest it is about how long term relationships change and can deteriorate, or how hard it can be to move home is just clutching at straws, there are much better ways to explore such themes if that were the intention. Like I’ve said, I’m happy for directors to break the rules but when trying to depict a home that has supposedly been lived in for some time, is special to its inhabitants and is known to all their artist friends as a hub of creativity, somewhere they have all each enjoyed solace at some point in the last twenty or so years, then maybe the house featured shouldn’t be a new build? It’s not much of an ‘artists house’ either, although at one point (the only part of the film we see some ‘art’) D dresses up and stands on a chair in what I can only guess is an attempt at performance art, but the house itself is new and the interiors don’t match the little creative output we see from the couple. It is of course possible that I’m missing the big point, the question and perhaps the answer, except the problem is I don’t care. I’m not in the least bit intrigued. I don’t care about either of them because I don’t really see them as real people. That’s not a problem with most films but Exhibition is supposed to be gritty realism, it isn’t, but that what it thinks it is. It is half and idea, an improvisation that never developed into a finished script. If you like this film then I’m very happy for you, you are easily pleased and life will therefore be more comfortable and exciting but personally I thought it was beyond dreadful, utterly boring and a waste of valuable time.