Super­no­va

Movies tend to run with the idea that love is the bliss­ful roman­tic ide­al we should all spend our lives chas­ing. Its mere men­tion implies hap­pi­ness and con­tent­ment, bright­ness and hope. The great Ger­man direc­tor Rain­er Wern­er Fass­binder made a career out of sug­gest­ing the oppo­site, that love is lit­tle more than a tor­ture device which serves to expe­dite our path to the grave.

Har­ry Macqueen’s sec­ond fea­ture, Super­no­va, pro­pos­es a third way, depict­ing love as the sum total of life’s mun­dane drudgery, of pride­ful accep­tance of unwant­ed pur­pose, and the retain­ing of bal­ance when con­front­ed with the bleak real­i­ty of human frailty.

Sam (Col­in Firth) is a tapped-out con­cert pianist who is intro­duced behind the wheel of a hulk­ing camper van which is ambling its way across the Eng­lish coun­try­side. His nav­i­ga­tor is Tusker (Stan­ley Tuc­ci), a waspish author with a sil­ver tongue whose iron­ic, pas­sen­ger-side com­men­tary becomes more wicked as Sam’s irri­ta­tion escalates.

It is soon estab­lished that the pair are a lov­ing cou­ple, head­ing out on what is hint­ed as an enforced hol­i­day – a break that nei­ther of them real­ly wants to take, but that nev­er­the­less seems essen­tial in this moment. As Sam stops off to pick up some din­ner sup­plies, he asks and asks again whether Tusker’s going to be okay wait­ing in the van, and Tusker seems offend­ed by the inti­ma­tion that he’s a small child who is prone to mis­chief. When Sam returns, Tusker is miss­ing, along with the fam­i­ly dog. Sam’s sud­den dis­may is laced with a sense of world-weari­ness – that this is some­thing he has had to deal with before.

It is then revealed that Tusker is not well, suf­fer­ing from ear­ly-onset demen­tia. He knows he has reached the point where he can no longer flip­pant­ly dis­miss the real­i­ty of his dete­ri­o­ra­tion, and he’s aware that he needs to make plans before body and mind are irrepara­bly sev­ered. Any­one who, when review­ing Har­ry Macqueen’s 2014 fea­ture debut, Hin­ter­land, ear­marked the writer/​director as one to watch, will be pleased to see that their pre­dic­tion was entire­ly on the mon­ey, as Super­no­va, while retain­ing a sim­i­lar inter­est in awk­ward human inti­ma­cies, marks a big leap for­ward in both scope and assuredness.

The nec­es­sary ground­work and con­text, as detailed above, does hint that we’re plung­ing into anoth­er maudlin, ​“dis­ease of the week” movie, but the film real­ly comes into its own in the sec­ond half as the fraught dynam­ic between the pair switch­es gear. Mac­queen is less inter­est­ed in depict­ing Tusker’s slow-fade into men­tal infir­mi­ty than he is look­ing at how these two men are able to cross-process this bleak sit­u­a­tion with the once-stur­dy mech­a­nisms of their own relationship.

It might seem disin­gen­u­ous to say that the film hangs on a sin­gle scene, but a late-game din­ner table con­fab is clear­ly the film’s dra­mat­ic and emo­tion­al pièce de résis­tance, a mas­ter­class of dia­logue writ­ing and deliv­ery which taps into some extreme­ly dif­fi­cult assump­tions about the para­dox­i­cal sting in true love’s tail. It’s a very fine film, one which sees its cre­ative par­tic­i­pants fir­ing on all cylin­ders as well as one which care­ful­ly treads a very fine line between melan­cholic pro­fun­di­ty and dis­mal bleakness.