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16 October
* Contains spoilery spoilers of a spoiler nature *
* Before getting here, you may have read the version put out by the studio, which is more of a review that can be read before seeing the film / if deciding whether to *
Experimentally, I have rated the film 76 = S : 13 / A : 15 / C : 11 / M : 12 / P : 13 / F : 12 - follow this for explanation...
Meg has issues with sex, seeks to ration it, or to rationalize it - maybe she cannot relate to Nick's desire for cunnilingus : has it ever happened, or does she tease as shown ?
When he touches her - or tries to - there is an exchange of hurts, and we see him pleading to penetrate her, but she wants to sleep
We hear, in an angry moment (after he has accused her of dressing up for the laptop guy, and she has looked affronted, brought out maybe prepared adjectives of the buy being sweaty and so on - a defence ? has she really not dressed up, etc., and it is all just Nick's projection ?) of an infidelity with a student 15 years ago
Oh, and I didn't like, @LeWeekendFilm, the flippancy of : Nick : You're bi-polar ! Meg : No, I'm tri-polar.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 17, 2013
Initiating, sustaining, enjoying sex / sexual action has become an enormous problem for these two. Nick is attracted by Meg's impulsiveness (having said, just before the quotation, that he likes her when she is like this), and flatters her, when she says that a man was chatting her up, by saying that she is hot, before being reminded that she is cold :
The chasteness of Diana, the allure for Actaeon of seeing her naked, the terrible price. It is not attraction / seduction / temptation with Nick and Meg, but humbling oneself for sex - may I, do I have permission, for what can be offered a glimpse of, then imperiously taken away (Nick's comment of lack of acquaintance with her vagina in the last 5 / 10 years) in self-denying sexual starvation
Maybe the fling 15 years ago is why Nick's latest job was at a former polytechnic in Birmingham (a fall from grace), although we are then talking only 1998 (with scarcely the highest pretended levels of scrutiny and integrity), and there has been a well-trodden path of randy supervisors and directors of studies, and willing undergraduates, that takes in The History Man, Tom Sharpe's books, and probably, between the lines, those of C. P. Snow, not to mention Michael Frayn's Donkeys' Years
This is all interesting. But there is a greater neurosis - on the threshold of the party at Morgan's, Meg is the one wanting to go into it / saying that she wants to go into it. It, though, is not a party party, and she immediately seems like a fish out of water, even saying something quite inept to Morgan's pregnant wife in the long time that we must imagine that Nick allows himself to push off with Morgan (and Morgan does not even think to effect any more than superficial introductions), before finding and meeting his son
Previously, Nick had almost to be dragged into the cemetery, but then, when we see him before Beckettt's memorial, he is / says that he is enjoying it, and wants to find Sartre
When he cannot sleep with Meg, Nick creates a shrine to the things that he loves - through Brodbent, we hear love being talked of, and know that Nick experiences it, although he mistakes helping his / their ? son, by having him at home, with what Meg might want
The flinching, the pain, at hearing about what happened to Morgan's ex-wife is quite unfeigned
Thirty years married doesn't seem long enough, and Nick we can imagine in communes and protests, but not Meg, unless the morbidity of their sex-life is the result of such drives and impulses as the craven way in which we him ask to penetrate her, and they have destroyed each other's simple pleasure in each other as a sexual companion
Introducing Morgan, and Nick's humiliating speech at the dinner, are turned into ways for the film to change direction, and we have to believe in the grace of Meg to hear and approve of Nick making massive admissions about himself and her
I can follow this film to the threshold of this device, but no further, and I see the - admittedly joyous - dancing at the end as acknowledging that it really has nothing to shed on what went before
No, not resolutions for resolutions' sake, but do we suddenly have to divest ourselves of the first half of the film in a way that - although joyous - feels pretty fake ?
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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