Drifting Clouds Recommends Joanna Hogg's Archipelago

This is the best British film I've seen this year by a country mile. Hogg's beautifully pared back visuals allow us to observe and capture the hidden meaning of the characters' apparently innocuous behaviour, but which masque seething resentments among the Leightons on a family holiday. The conflicts are unbarable at times, and the tension among the family members is white knuckle. See this film. James. Below I have reproduced Philip French's review of the film in the Guardian. Archipelago – review, by Philip French, Sunday March 11th. Joanna Hogg's excellent second feature revisits the English middle classes, this time on a tense farewell family holiday Two years ago the British writer-director Joanna Hogg made her feature debut with Unrelated, a highly promising movie about a middle-class woman in her mid-40s leaving her husband in England to spend a holiday with a party of well-heeled, highly disagreeable friends at a grand Tuscan villa they've hired for a summer vacation. Her second film, the defiantly art-house Archipelago, is a variation on the same situation: a family holidays in the Scilly Isles and the father doesn't turn up. It's a confident advance on the earlier picture and one of the three most formally interesting British movies of the past few years, all directed (or co-directed) by women, the other two being Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor's Helen and Clio Barnard's The Arbor. Production year: 2010 Country: UK Cert (UK): 15 Runtime: 114 mins Directors: Joanna Hogg Cast: Amy Lloyd, Christopher Bake, Christopher Baker, Kate Fahy, Lydia Leonard, Tom Hiddleston As with the Japanese master Ozu, Hogg never moves her camera, each shot being carefully composed and long held. There are no close-ups until near the end, at which point there's also a single camera movement when one character comes down the stairs and startles us by rushing across a room to open a letter of farewell. There's no music in Archipelago, and like Eric Rohmer, another film-maker she evidently admires, Hogg has a preference for natural light and the particular tones and atmosphere it creates. In addition, much of the dialogue appears to be semi-improvised, reproducing the hesitancies and broken rhythms of everyday speech. Finally, she joins Julian Fellowes in consciously restoring to our cinema middle-class life as a proper subject for serious film-making and bringing to bear on it a knowing and critical eye. The film takes place on Tresco, one of the Scilly Islands off the coast of Cornwall, and the title suggests a connection between the group of islands and the fractured nature of the Leighton family who've rented a house there. But Patricia Leighton, the mother (Kate Fahy), and her children, Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) and Edward (Tom Hiddleston), both in their late 20s, are not here for a jovial summer gathering. This is one of those out-of-season films that provide a suitably sombre setting for contemplation. The holidaymakers are long gone, the choppy sea is uninviting, the sky overcast, the locals are shooting pheasants, and the visitors are wrapped up against the searching wind. The precise time is marked as late October, early November, when Edward picks up what we think to be a brooch to pin on the sweater of Rose (Amy Lloyd), the pretty cook hired along with the house. It turns out to be a Remembrance Day poppy, though the feeling of it being an affectionate, probably mildly erotic gesture remains. The family finds itself in this familiar place, where they've often spent holidays together, to mark the departure of Edward, who at 29 is about to give up a lucrative job in the City to spend a year in Africa as a voluntary worker, advising villagers on Aids and safe sex. It becomes clear that his mother and sister have doubts about his career change, which Cynthia mocks as a delayed gap year, and gradually we become aware of fissures breaking the smooth surface. Initially, nobody ever says quite what they mean during their small talk and their dinner-table chat, though certain problems are brought into focus by the presence of Christopher, a mild-mannered minor artist who gives lessons to Patricia and Cynthia. He explains to them that to him the art of painting resides in producing well-ordered works into which a certain element of chance and chaos is allowed to enter. This becomes a metaphor for their middle-class life, though dangerous to embrace. There are some wonderful moments, a number of them painfully funny, as the family, their cook and the painter friend interact. Cynthia and Patricia, for instance, turn against Edward when his newly found egalitarianism and sense of social duty compel him to treat Rose as an equal, inviting her to dine with them. In an exquisitely timed and observed scene of escalating embarrassment, they all lunch at the otherwise empty restaurant of a local hotel. Under Cynthia's direction, they change tables until finding the right one and the proper seating order. Then Cynthia, who combines insecurity with social assertion, criticises the food and demands to see the chef. As the others cringe, he politely explains to her that guinea fowl should be a trifle underdone. Later there's a touching moment when Edward seeks to cheer up the depressed Cynthia by speaking to her in nursery language using a glove puppet held around a door. Archipelago is a subtle film of sensed absences. The father, whose pompous manner Edward mocks, never arrives. Edward's girlfriend, Chloe, who won't be allowed to accompany him to Africa, has not been invited to the reunion. As Cynthia condescendingly and revealingly tells her brother, Chloe is "not family, just someone you're attached to". Then there's the absence of a picture removed from above the living-room fireplace, leaving a rectangle of unfaded wallpaper. What is it the family can't bear to contemplate? Well, it has to do with the chaotic, uncontrollable character of the natural world, and the painting's eventual return to the wall is part of the film's satisfactorily open ending. There's also another absence we experience. The screen is often unpopulated as people enter and leave the frame, and we're invited to think of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy of "immaterialism", the belief that the world only exists as we feel and perceive it, and of Dr Johnson's brutal refutation of this belief. And here's a link back to the original page for this review. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/mar/06/archipelago-philip-french-review