Dir. Simon Welsford, UK, 2007, 84 mins
Cast: Alex Reid, Jamie Draven, Cal Macaninch
Review by Carol Allen
This has been talked up as another "Memento" in that it is a thriller which reveals its story through flashback. This first feature by writer/director Welsford is however a much less complex and stylish affair than Nolan's intriguing puzzle.
A young woman is washed up on a deserted beach. She finds a man in the same situation. She revives him but he attacks her and she runs away. Who are they and how did they get there?
To find out we move into a series of flashbacks, where we discover the woman (Reid) is called Rachel and she is spying on her new lover Jack (Macaninch), an inventor of some new technological marvel, at the behest of the man she really loves, Kemp (Draven). But all is not as it seems. We then find out that Rachel is really Grace, a surveillance officer. The real Rachel is a different young woman altogether. The memories we've been watching are hers but played out with Grace in the role. It's part of Grace's job to identify totally with the subject of her spying to the extent of imagining herself as that other woman. And when the effects of this technique on Grace's personality are finally revealed, that is when the film loses its credibility and becomes a story to make any self respecting feminist see red. Without giving too much away, why must a woman's story in such movies always rely on her need for a man?
The film is however well shot apparently totally on location. The desolate sands of the deserted seaside resort where the pair find themselves are particularly effective and the editing leaves us in no doubt, when we are in the present and when in past. The London locations are not quite so successful. Jack's shoddy looking conversion flat seems out of key with his character for example and the sound, presumably also recorded on location, sometimes makes the dialogue a bit difficult to hear. But if you can accept the somewhat unlikely central premise and the film's depiction of the industrial espionage world as having many of the trappings of James Bond land without the state of the art cars and glamorous settings, then this is a not too bad little thriller and a promising directorial debut. |
