360 | Little White Lies

360

09 Aug 2012 / Released: 10 Aug 2012

A woman with long, dark hair and a serious expression looking directly at the camera.
A woman with long, dark hair and a serious expression looking directly at the camera.
4

Anticipation.

Surely something to enjoy in that cast, the director of City of God and a classic source.

1

Enjoyment.

Nearly two hours of smug circle-jerking.

2

In Retrospect.

There’s one Anthony Hopkins monologue to remember, but that only highlights everything the rest of the film so sorely lacks.

Fer­nan­do Meirelles glo­be­trot­ting ensem­ble dra­ma is a con­trived, bub­ble-wrapped por­trait of the glob­al village.

Blame Mag­no­lia if you want. Or Crash, or Babel, or any one of those epics of glob­al inti­ma­cy that have coa­lesced into a genre of their own over the last decade or so. But where those films at least attempt­ed to draw on real social anx­i­eties around urban alien­ation, or strug­gled with the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of the post‑9/​11 world, 360 just draws on those films. And Love Actually.

Despite claims that the film is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 stage play, La Ronde’ – a bit­ing satire of class trans­gres­sion in fin de siè­cle Vien­na with heaps of sex – 360 offers us a pret­ti­ly shot, care­free world where even gener­ic East­ern Euro­pean pimps and buzz-cut Amer­i­can sex crim­i­nals have a clean shot at redemption.

The glo­be­trot­ting nar­ra­tive focus­es on the abortive pros­ti­tu­tion­al dal­liance of a mis­cel­la­neous Inter­na­tion­al Busi­ness Trav­eller played by Jude Law, anoth­er of the dwee­by, Beta-male char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions he’s get­ting wor­ry­ing­ly good at.

Law’s wife (Rachel Weisz) waits for him in her expen­sive kitchen in the Lon­don Bor­ough of Richard Cur­tis, arrang­ing the next illic­it sex ses­sion with a beef­cake Brazil­ian pho­tog­ra­ph­er who, in turn, has a feisty Lati­na girl­friend who… And so on and so on.

It’s not an orig­i­nal device, but with this cast and a screen­play by the writer of The Last King of Scot­land and Frost/​Nixon, it should add up to more than the crush­ing­ly obvi­ous cin­e­mat­ic equiv­a­lent of a Marie Clare issues’ fea­turette. There are a few moments of charm that don’t feel con­trived, and one stand-out per­for­mance by Ben Fos­ter as the parolee strug­gling with his urge to rape up an entire air­port lounge. But it’s mea­gre pay­back for near­ly two hours of mid­dle­brow noodling.

It’s telling that Schnitzler’s play begins and ends with his pros­ti­tute, where 360 focus­es on the jour­ney of well-off cou­ple Law and Weisz. If that shift is a nod to the film’s tar­get audi­ence, it’s prob­a­bly spot on: this is a sani­tised, bub­ble-wrapped pic­ture of the glob­al vil­lage that pro­vides ersatz-seri­ous view­ing for those seek­ing reas­sur­ance about the big lie of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry – that We’re All In It Togeth­er. Worse, it isn’t even any fun.

You might like