Watch: UNKLE Premiere ‘Saviors and Angels’
By: Samuel Smith
A car pulls up, its driver dragging nervously on a cigarette as another driver gets out of his car. The two greet each other in an Eastern European dialect (Russian?) before the first man opens his car boot to let a young girl climb cheerily out and join the second man.
The film follows the new pair as they travel about London, a happy couple snapping photos in train stations and smiling at the winter sun until, while walking through Soho, they are accosted by a man demanding recompense for money owed by the first fellow. From there the film devolves into a three part disturbing postmodern narrative about abuse, sex and violence. There are some delicately shot instances, particularly at the beginning of the second segment that treads away from the linear narrative of the first and into a kaleidoscope of dreamstate sub-narrative.
In all, the second part feels like a music video. Nothing overtly innovative in aesthetic terms; a lot of slow motion shots of sexual deviancy and discomfort. If anything, the team behind the film seem set upon depicting sex as loss - the physical as a divided mutually exclusive from sentiment. F**king loneliness, in the literal sense of that moribund word. Both the theoretical and physical centres of the film oscillate around a scene in which the previously happy ca- boot detainee - now sold off as a sex slave, presumably for the other man's debt - undresses for an old man who, unable to meet her eyes (nor she his), says "I'm lonely, can I hold your hand", before turning away and bringing her arm over him in a skeletal, foetal embrace. A segueway that leads directly into the third part - a visual symbol of the physical decay from birth to death.
At this point we should probably discuss the music, but that seems a fairly banal thing to do in the face of the gravity of the themes discussed by the film. The highest compliment I suppose would be that the music is the film. Spike Jonze et al have worked at making music as inseparable from film - the two make the whole, much as the absence of one makes the other.
The third and final part investigates the idea of what a life is - whether it's a collection of images and moments, two dimensional videos that can be projected onto a screen, or something more perverse - a stretching and distending of childhood, that we as adults are all essentially just children who have been pulled and distorted beyond recognition.
I didn't want it to, but this film sat fairly heavy on me. The content itself isn't overtly emotive, but it is the combination of ideas and music that tugs you a little. It's not like watching Dancer In The Dark, but it certainly puts you off balance a little.
Artists in this article: UNKLE