Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

[Joly MacFie <joly AT punkcast.com>]

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Public-spaces-private-lives/29791

Joanna Hogg’s third feature, “Exhibition”, had its premiere at the
Locarno Film Festival last month. It stars the musician and film
director Viv Albertine (best known as member of post-punk band the
Slits) and conceptualist Liam Gillick as D and H, an artist couple
selling their home in West London. There is little story as such,
rather the film unfolds as a series of episodes and tableaux, laying
out creative tensions, sexual anxiety and ennui, and in D’s case
strongly suggesting frustration at coming second to H’s clearly more
successful career.

The film has something to unsettle everybody. Middle-class couples of
a certain age will squirm at the mis-timed communication between its
two leads; H’s well-intentioned but self-regarding ego will likely
seem very familiar to many women. Those who think artists live a
pampered life, devoid of contact with the everyday demands of the
wider world, will see their suspicions confirmed on screen. And, with
a great deal of the tension created by implication and hint, an air of
trepidation permeates the film, creating the constant expectation that
something very bad might be about to unfold or will be shown to have
happened in the past.

The sparse dialogue and slight awkwardness of the principal actors,
both making their debuts, adds to the unease. More often than not,
they communicate by intercom from their respective creative spaces.
The beautiful but soulless house they live in (the self-designed
former home of the architect James Melvin) is the film’s third
principal actor. Its fortress-like exterior and shifting internal
divisions further isolate the human performers and Hogg makes
affecting use of sound as the heavy sliding doors are often heard to
open and close at a remove, suggesting an action that leaves one of
the principals—more often than not D—along with the audience to guess
what may be happening elsewhere.

There’s a subject fit here with Michael Haneke’s or Ian McEwan’s
portrayals of creeping middle-class paranoia but Hogg never takes
things to those writers’ destructive conclusions. Will D’s forthcoming
exhibition allow her to get out from under H’s ego? Will the sale of
the house, so central to the way they relate to each other, allow them
to breathe? We’ll never know: the low-level and permanent fear that we
are teetering on the edge of disaster is all that’s left.

“Exhibition” is due to be released in 2014.

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