starlady | Trance (2013) (Reply)

Trance. 2013. Dir. Danny Boyle.

I went to see Trance at the Shattuck Cinema's "screener lounge," which has couch seating and lets you drink beer, on Sunday, and it was a wonderful break from entirely too much time over the past few weeks spent with my face buried in spreadsheets. I recently saw somewhere someone going on about how we are in a terrible era for cinema, but somewhere in the middle of the introductory heist sequence in Trance I found myself thinking, "Well, there's at least one director out there who still knows how to make a movie," and I stand by that statement.

Although I've enjoyed other Danny Boyle films, the real reason I went to see this was that it stars James McAvoy, who is a fantastic actor, and his performance and those of the other two leads, Vincent Cassel and Rosario Dawson, did not disappoint. The script is also quite clever--although I was able to guess some of the plot twists, I didn't guess all of them, or their full scope, and I enjoyed not being able to entirely predict where it was going. Aside from the acting and the script, the cinematography and the colors of the film are also brilliant, and the music is fantastic. It helped that I was forewarned by the NYT review not to be distracted by the McAvoy pretty.

The NYT review also lamented that Boyle didn't do something really radical and show McAvoy full frontally naked, which I agree with for multiple reasons.

theletteraesc said at one point that she found parts of this movie hard to watch, rather like Shame, and there are some shots that are rather gruesome and/or graphic. I was also not really convinced that we needed the exposure to Danny Boyle's id in the form of the sequence in which Rosario Dawson's character Elizabeth completely shaves her pubic hair to satisfy the sexual fantasy of Simon, McAvoy's character. It was awkward in the way that reading some of Samuel R. Delany's books can be, and even though there's a later sequence that gives it a fig leaf (har) of plot justification, it felt gratuitous and exploitative.

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cindypon remarked that she thought that the ending got cartoonish, but compared to, say, a Tarantino film, it was pretty restrained, and I thought the ending mostly worked, though I had a couple nitpicks in the last few sequences. (Well, actually, no, here's one consistent nitpick: the only black criminal in the gang, Nate, is also the only one who's susceptible to Elizabeth Lamb's "feel your fear" hypnotherapy session, and he's also the one who tries to rape her later on. Kiiind of questionable there, Danny Boyle.) One of the things I really liked the movie overall was the way the script gradually reversed our perspectives on Simon and Elizabeth, and though I still had some unanswered questions at the end, it was a really enjoyable and satisfying film all in all.