|
“I see dead people” is not exactly a recent phenomenon in
movies. Cinema itself is a perpetual state of “déjà vu”—a
haunted house populated by phantasmic bodies performing acts
that, by their very nature, are already ghostly.
In fact, a whole genre of films focus specifically on the
resurrection of the dead. Frankenstein, Dracula,
and The Mummy are obsessed with the subject. Love stories
from The Ghost And Mrs. Muir to Somewhere In Time
romanticize the dead as lovesick time-travelers. The Blair
Witch Project and The Ring portray the dead as
the artistic creators of powerful poetic experiences that
destroy the living. The two greatest examples in the genre
are arguably Vertigo and Psycho, in which the
ultimate blonde love goddess and the ultimate domineering
mother cannot be laid to rest, and hopelessly curse the lives
of the men who love them.
Time will eat us all—so why not use the movies we consume
to take a bite out of it? Thus, we are often unkind to the
dead in films. They often return as a form of consumer crisis—eat
or be eaten. If they aren’t cast as chomping zombies in The
Night Of The Living Dead, we treat them as therapeutic
agents upon which we feed, sentimental self-help devices to
help us recharge our spiritual batteries. They come back only
to help us get over them. So much for resting in peace. Movies
are made by the living, for the living. We often indulge ourselves
at the expense of lost souls, whose existence we fail to recognize
as anything but an extension of our own needs and fears. Rarely
are the dead treated with real imagination in cinema. If we
are going to invite the dead for a return visit, we could
at least explore our own assumptions about them.
In Till Human Voices Wake Us, Sam Franks, a psychiatrist
(Pearce) returns home to Victoria, Australia after
the death of his emotionally repressed father. Sam must confront
his own repression regarding the death of his girlfriend Silvy
(a luminous Harman), who died years before when they
were both teenagers. The movie alternates Sam’s present with
flashbacks from his adolescence (teenage Sam is well-played
by Joyner), until the two strands of time come together
to release him from his own grief, so he can let go of the
past.
When he later rescues a woman from drowning and helps her
recuperate, mysterious coincidences ensue. Ruby (Carter)
is an amnesiac, but constantly uses phrases and gestures that
eerily approximate those of Sam’s dead girlfriend. Could it
be? Yes, it is Silvy, inexplicably reincarnated as an adult
in the form of Helena Bonham Carter, despite the fact that
the two actresses barely resemble each other. A ghost? The
psychological projection of a desperate man?
Trust me, this film is built to deflect mysteries, not to
explore them. Ultimately you will not care if you, much the
less the characters, are alive or dead, because not only do
the dearly departed get no breaks in the film, neither do
the living, despite the fact that the hero is reborn into
the world of the living from the dank pit of his own despair.
At least as ghouls in horror films or as impossible otherworldly
love interests, the dead are allowed some charisma. Here,
the film’s writer/director unwittingly embalms both the living
and the dead in a tomb of torturous, tasteful filmmaking.
This movie is so relentlessly literate and strategically planned,
I felt like Sam’s father, who dies with his eyes wide open
staring at pieces on a chessboard. Mercifully, he expires
within the film’s first 10 minutes, while I suffered through
to its pretentious end.
Till Human Voices ceaselessly works its cloying bourgeois
mojo. Its leads are prestigious, sometimes priggish actors
with good bone structure—note Pearce and Carter’s impressively
square jawlines and serious attitudes. The cinematography
is color-coded in watery blues and greens to conveniently
direct viewers to themes of drowning, personal transformation,
and the fluidity of time. The events may be traumatic, but
the setting is bucolic. Literary reference—but not too challenging,
please!—adds to the film’s class-conscious vibe. T.S. Eliot’s
“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is quoted from not once,
but twice—your cue to heft and ponder its significance as
the source of the film’s title and congratulate yourself on
your middle-class education. Everyone works hard to produce
a beautiful film—and kills it off completely in the process.
Till Human Voices is painstakingly tasteful, right
down to a sex scene with minimal, carefully blocked nudity
between Sam and Ruby, who, despite being a supernatural emanation,
has conveniently returned as fuckable flesh and blood. Since
they can share tender quotations from T.S. Eliot and “explore
difficult issues” together, the fact that Sam has just become
a necrophiliac doesn’t seem to be an issue! (Writer/director
Petroni ironically has gone on to contribute as a screenwriter
to, of all things, Queen Of The Damned.)
A movie like Till Human Voices refuses to allow itself
or its audience to be haunted. It exists to minimize any sense
of loss, much less emotional response from viewers, by providing
a movie-going experience that can make a viewer feel serious
and capable of confronting weighty issues, while risking as
little as possible—the very definition of empty pomposity,
or perhaps simply an inexperienced writer/director’s need
to demonstrate class and control. The equivalent of an expensive
designer life jacket, this film keeps viewers from drowning,
rather than letting them go with the flow of life and death.
—Ellen Whittier
|
out of 5
While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
