Based on a True Story – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Based on a True Sto­ry – first look review

27 May 2017

Words by David Jenkins

Two women with dark hair embracing intimately, faces close together.
Two women with dark hair embracing intimately, faces close together.
This cun­ning lit­er­ary thriller from Roman Polan­s­ki intrigues rather than wows at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

Is there a more ter­ri­fy­ing sight in cin­e­ma than Eva Green chan­nelling all her pent up fury into a defec­tive food mix­er, smash­ing it into smithereens with the aid of a giant rolling-pin? This is an image which haunts the dreams of the suc­cess­ful author, Del­phine de Vigan (Emmanuelle Seign­er), who has made a finan­cial killing by memo­ri­al­is­ing the trag­ic life of her late mother.

She lives in fear that fans will accuse her of exploita­tion, and that she is seen as prof­i­teer­ing from sec­ond-hand adver­si­ty. This para­noia is cul­ti­vat­ed when Green’s elle” (her) enters the fray, her appar­ent kind­ness always cut through with a malev­o­lent unease. Elle works as a celebri­ty ghost writer, and lives in total ease with the notion of trans­form­ing real expe­ri­ence (or, at least, a person’s rec­ol­lec­tion of lived expe­ri­ence) into a glossy page-turn­er. Delphine’s lit­er­ary celebri­ty means that her work is deemed more artis­ti­cal­ly valu­able, and so the film starts to ask if all fic­tion isn’t just gussied-up non-fic­tion? Real­i­ty recycled.

This film was writ­ten by Polan­s­ki and Olivi­er Assayas, and the clam­my paw prints of both film­mak­ers are clear­ly vis­i­ble. Del­phine feels suf­fo­cat­ed by her fans and those who want to cel­e­brate her work, and Polanski’s pet theme of how claus­tro­pho­bia can man­i­fest in unex­pect­ed ways is clev­er­ly wrought into the text. And even when she opts for leav­ing her Paris apart­ment for a coun­try­side retreat, the space and the ease of life actu­al­ly are counter-weighed by the fact that she is now cut-off and vul­ner­a­ble. She also thinks she might have the upper hand with the increas­ing­ly unread­able Elle.

Assayas brings over his abid­ing inter­est of the per­sona swap motif, and the film is essen­tial­ly a psy­cho­log­i­cal war of attri­tion between the two women. It’s rather a sim­ple sto­ry and it deals explic­it­ly with Big Themes, but it always seems to defy expec­ta­tion and nev­er ful­ly descends into lurid pulp. It’s a film which does just enough to make you believe that what you’re watch­ing is a real, human sto­ry, but with every scene, plants the seed of doubt as to whether Elle is some kind of psy­chic pro­jec­tion or the phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of a dam­aged mind.

It’s easy to dis­miss this as light, late Polan­s­ki – a work-out more than a ful­ly-fledged movie. But it does work nice­ly in tan­dem with his two of his recent films, 2010’s The Ghost Writer and 2013’s Venus in Furs. The for­mer explored the eth­i­cal intri­ca­cies of writ­ing about the lives of oth­ers, while the lat­ter dis­sect­ed the creator’s frag­ile ego and its ten­den­cy for self-destruc­tion. The wall-to-wall synth Musak prob­a­bly makes the whole thing a lit­tle tough to swal­low, but this is rich with ideas and sur­pris­ing wisps of dra­ma. It’s also a high­ly self-crit­i­cal film, which is an all-too-rare spec­ta­cle these days.

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