The Guardian - 30.08.2019

• The Guardian
  Friday 30 August 2019 9
  Reviews Film

The Informer

★★★☆☆

Dir Andrea Di Stefano

Starring Rosamund Pike,

Joel Kinnaman, Common

Dur 113mins Cert 15

The Swedish crime novel Three

Seconds by Anders Roslund and

Börge Hellström has been relocated

to modern-day New York in this big,

chewy and sometimes indigestible

drama thriller from director Andrea

Di Stefano, who has adapted the

novel with with British screenwriter

Rowan Joff e. It’s a story about an

undercover agent who, in time-

honoured style, is informed by his

duplicitous handlers that he can’t be

brought in from the cold just yet.

Joel Kinnaman (below) plays Pete

Koslow, an ex-con out on licence and

working for a Polish drug gang but

secretly feeding information to FBI

agent Wilcox (Rosamund Pike). The

big drug deal whose exposure was

supposed to be his ticket out of the

game ends in bloody chaos when

a cop is killed by one of the trigger-

happy gangsters, and the hatchet-

faced crime overlord decrees that

in penance Koslow must break his

parole conditions and return to

prison to supervise the gang’s drug

distribution there. Wilcox grimly

tells Koslow that he must go along

with this scheme: a nightmare

journey back to jail – back to the

belly of the beast.

This is a tough, muscular,

sweaty thriller, swarming with

minor characters ; there is hardly

a square inch of skin not covered

in an elaborately threatening

prison tattoo. The rapper and

actor Common gives a strong,

plausible performance as NYPD

detective Grens, a straight-arrow

cop investigating the murder of

a fellow offi cer and suspicious at

the stonewalling attitude from the

FBI: especially Wilcox’s slippery

superior, Montgomery, played by

Clive Owen.

The Informer is a fi lm spread

over a big canvas, but by the time

of  its big fi nale it is leaking energy.

It might have made better sense

as an episodic drama on television

but it is brash and watchable ,

its world reeking with cynicism

and fear. PB

Dazzling study of privilege

puts Hogg in the limelight

a pied-à-terre kept by her extremely

well-off parents, who have a country

place in north Norfolk. Her mother

sometimes pops in after shopping

expeditions, and is always having

to “lend” Julie money for her fi lm

projects, yet Julie is charmingly

open about her advantages in life.

Then the vampiri c fi gure of

Anthony makes his appearance.

He is a supercilious, opinionated

young man with a job in the Foreign

Offi ce and an insidious knack of

playing on Julie’s insecurities by

asking pointedly sceptical, quizzical

questions about her work and

airily claiming to admire Powell

and Pressburger. His seduction

technique involves taking her

to the Wallace Collection to see

Fragonard’s painting The Souvenir.

It isn’t long before this sinister

character has moved in and is buying

Julie erotic lingerie, taking her to

Venice, disrupting her fi lm-making

plans and upending her life.

In another movie, this would

make for black comedy, and it feels

like the plot for something by Muriel

Spark, or an early AN Wilson novel.

But comedy isn’t what’s happening.

So what is? Something far subtler

and more incremental.

Anthony is played with

under stated arrogance by Tom

Burke , and newcomer Honor

Swinton Byrne gives a graceful and

insouciant performance as Julie. She

is the daughter of Tilda Swinton,

who duly plays Julie’s mother,

unobtrusively aged up as a patrician

mamma. At fi rst I wondered if there

was meta-textual humour in this

casting but it is simply that their

on-screen rapport is tremendous.

Hogg creates an almost trance-

like state with the fi lm, which she

shakes off when Anthony and Julie

host a dinner party attended by

Anthony’s insuff erable fi lm-maker

friend (a hilarious cameo for Richard

Ayoade ) who brayingly announces

that it is appalling how Britain,

the home of the Stones, the Kinks

and the Small Faces, still doesn’t

do movie musicals. (He doesn’t

mention the Who, so is maybe not

a fan of Tommy .) It is this character

who will reveal the poison cloud

gathering over the head of poor

innocent Julie.

The Souvenir is at least partly

autobiographical on Hogg’s

part, and it sometimes feels as if

it circling around and around a

memory that is too painful to be

approached directly , of an episode

which arguably endangered her

development as an artist and in

another way stimulated it. But

there is something so coolly elegant

in this circling – a choreography of

young love, and a talent preparing

to take fl ight.

when each of her three previous

fi lms was a winner for those open-

minded enough to see them. The

rather lovely poster image of its

two leads may induce audiences

to expect something romantic and

comfortingly mainstream. Wrong.

The Souvenir is an artefact in the

highest auteur register. Its absence

of tonal readability is a challenge.

But there is also a cerebrally fi erce,

slow-burn passion in its austere,

unemphasised plainness.

Hogg conducts her dramatic

business in a sort of indoor available

light, with characters often receding

into semi-darkness if they walk

away from windows: a look Hogg

has contrived in her other fi lms. It is

a fi lm about the upper classes, but

not in the Downton Abbey style: it

is about the upper classes as they

actually are, in the dull day-to-day;

a social realist movie about posh

people. It’s as if Hogg has found a

contemporary English response to

the rhetoric of Antonioni or Visconti.

The setting is the early 80s, and

a sweet-natured young fi lm student

called Julie lives in a smart fl at

in London’s Knightsbridge, just

across from the cupola of Harrods

department store. This is evidently

★★★★★

Dir Joanna Hogg

Starring Honor Swinton Byrne,

Tom Burke, Tilda Swinton

Dur 120mins Cert 15

J

oanna Hogg’s new movie

is her most intensely

personal yet – but this

mysterious and beautiful

fi lm is not revelatory

in any obvious way.

I  have seen it twice since writing

about the premiere at Sundance in

January, and the things about it that

perplexed and baffl ed and bemused

and entranced me then have done so

more fi ercely in the meantime. Yet

its diffi culties now feel not like fl aws

but rather sunspots of inspiration.

The mother-daughter relationship

is quietly superb and the musical

interludes are wonderful: there is

a glorious outing for Robert Wyatt’s

haunting Shipbuilding and Willie

Mabon’s Poison Ivy.

The Souvenir has already received

plaudits as a breakthrough for

this director – although I don’t

think she needed a “breakthough”

Social realism
about posh people
... Tom Burke and
Honor Swinton
Byrne in Souvenir

and fear. PB

Peter Bradshaw’s fi lm of the week

The Souvenir

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