Lawless Heart

After reading an interview with Bill Nighy, where he talked up this little-seen British film, I tracked it down, and I’m glad I did. The storyline can seem reductively familiar: the film follows three men in a small coastal British town, each kind of grappling with their own sense of self and their respective love lives, following the funeral of a man close to all. What makes the film stand out–beyond its excellent performances–is its structure: we follow first one man’s story. Then we rewind, and the film re-focalizes around another man, and then again for a third act. This repetition is not about twists and big startling revelations; instead, each return subtly shifts, expands, complicates our understanding of character and the scope of the events. Stray details from one story have a startling and lovely resonance in other storylines. Further, as the film moves along it is able to rely upon our prior viewing, and we get shorter and shorter fragments of scenes, as the film becomes increasingly impressionistic. The glory of the film is in that pointillist observation and detail, out of which we get–from such small stories–a very lovely sense of identity, change, history.

Now, all that said, a weakness of the film is its focus on three men, with some (as noted previously) overly-familiar narrative concerns (a middle-aged man in a loveless marriage…. again?!?). I wish we’d learned more about some of the women in the film…. but it is a nice find, and worth checking out.