S
o, what did Oscar winning director Danny Boyle do in his free time while directing the Opening ceremonies of the London 2012 Summer Olympics which had a cast of 10,000 including Queen Elizabeth II as – well – Queen Elizabeth II and was watched by an audience of close to a billion people on television ?
To start with he directed a successful West End production of Frankenstein featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, who are currently playing separate Sherlocks on TV shows
And if that wasn’t enough Boyle also shot Trance, a psychological heist thriller.
In Trance – Rosario Dawson plays Elizabeth, a hypnotherapist hired by a crime boss – played by Vincent Cassel – to uncover the whereabouts of a stolen painting. The whereabouts happen to be hidden deep within the subconscious memory of James McAvoy’s amnesiac art auctioneer
The New York Times film critic calls Boyle’s work – “cinema of attraction and repulsion.” How very true – there are parts of the movie where Boyle’s use of music – superb! – and colour and camera work seduce you but there are also scenes where his images of violence – stark and realistic as they are – repulse.
The same can be said of the three main characters – our impressions of who they are and our initial feelings about them change – dramatically. Our initial attraction turns into repulsion and then back again.
There are moments when the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief is strained to the limit and moments when we wonder what we have wandered into – is this really a heist movie or is the heist just one of Hitchcock’s beloved Macguffins? Or is this really a black comedy? Or a very adult and very twisted love triangle? And towards the end of the movie do we have one of those “I never saw that coming” moments? Or do we feel like we’ve just seen out-takes from Inception?
In an era of box office driven super hero and/or blockbuster movies, it’s a welcome relief to sit back and enter into the intelligent, well written and well acted world that is Trance where the usual “kiss kiss, bang bang” is transformed. What starts off as a simple heist movie gradually peels back layers of character and plot in an attempt to bend my mind. Now that’s entertainment.