Danny Boyle’s New Movie Is All About Hypnosis And Shaved Genitals
The British director's new film, Trance, is typically insane (spoilers, obviously).
This review contains spoilers. Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers… stop worrying about spoilers!
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“No piece of art is worth a human life,” says James McAvoy’s pasty fine art auctioneer, Simon, at the start of Danny Boyle’s new film, Trance. The line could serve as a unifying credo to describe Danny Boyle’s general approach to cinema: a mounting piss-take that courts stylistic excess over all else.
Trance, a pretty silly tale about a small-time thief (McAvoy) who misplaces the loot and develops amnesia when he’s hit in the head during a Goya art heist gone wrong, shares much stylistically with Boyle’s early career breakthrough, Trainspotting. It’s filled with the same kinetic energy, the nutso flamboyance, and surrealistic flights of fancy that characterised that story of depraved Scottish burnouts.
Remember that scene in Trainspotting when Renton dives into the dirty pub toilet to recover his shit-smeared suppositories, and ends up in a weird underwater world? In Trance, a black dude gets shot in the dick. Right up in it. Bloods spills from his underpants as he squirms across the linoleum floor shrieking in agony. They may not seem related, but both scenes are clear examples of Boyle’s annoying tendencies, an aesthetic that often takes things to nihilistic extremes just for kicks, regularly reminds you of the artifice of what you’re watching, and installs an emotional distance.
In a recent interview, Boyle blamed his London Olympics opening ceremony gig for the film’s morbid streak. “It isn’t a natural redemptive movie like the two most recent ones [Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours],” he said. “But I blame the Olympics for how quite dark it is. It’s the mad, evil twin cousin.” To further quote the piece: “He says he was warned not to do the Olympics in isolation because it would drive him mad, so to keep his sanity he decided to make a movie about insanity and amnesia and unknown mental states.”
The Olympics opening ceremony was an odd job for Boyle, who snarkily lampooned London during that funny montage in Trainspotting (goofy shots of tourists eating ice cream, provincial cops on horses). But really, it says something about a man if his key to mental stability involves the need to blow up dicks, pull nails, and transform an art heist thriller into a weirdly trivial revenge flick (more Tarantino-esque nonsense).
The film takes an intriguing turn when Boyle introduces Dr. Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), a hypnotherapist assigned to bore into Simon’s mind to help discover the painting’s location. As the trance sessions escalate and Lamb uses her power to turn the players against each other, we soon start to realise that the unfolding story may not be the narrator’s own, and the audience ends up as mentally fucked as Simon, wondering which of his memories are authentic and which are just fabricated suggestions implanted by the femme fatale.
As Boyle recently explained to Paste, this is his first film featuring a central female character. “I never made a film with a woman at the heart of it,” he told the magazine. “And I was really disappointed in myself because I have two wonderful daughters, who are now both in their twenties. […] I’ve made boy’s movies, and I don’t apologise for that. I’m a boy at heart still. I make boy’s movies. But really, come on.”
The key line there isn’t the sweet mumblings about his daughters, but the latter. Boyle films sex with all the maturity of a tittering kid (maybe he’s stuck in his altar boy days). It’s often interrupted by some odd minutiae, like a surprising soccer video (Trainspotting) or, in this case, an odd pubic shave. The film reaches its ludicrous heights when Elizabeth interrupts a passionate kiss to wander over to the bathroom, an odd whirring emanating from behind the closed door. Seconds later, she saunters out a hairless wonder, a ‘gift’ for Simon’s aesthetic tastes (he’s a lover of Rembrandt’s ‘bare ladies’, you see).
From there on, the film’s a confusing mess of flashbacks, dream sequences and other shit that’s just an excuse for Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle to go nuts with gore, jump cuts, and their red and green neon lights. It’s strange coming off the back off 127 Hours, his emotional film about Aron Ralston’s boulder-on-arm misadventures. That film nicely focused Boyle’s restless energy into a confined narrative that didn’t even sacrifice his surrealistic tendencies or love of insane hallucinatory sequences. Maybe that’s the answer: stick him back in another crevice and see what he can do!