The Escape

Since her break­out per­for­mance in St Trinian’s a lit­tle over a decade ago, Gem­ma Arter­ton has flit­tered between lurid CG epics (Clash of the Titans, Prince of Per­sia), off­beat genre odd­i­ties (Byzan­tium, Hansel & Gre­tel: Witch Hunters) and win­some bucol­ic romps (Tama­ra Drewe, Gem­ma Bovery), prov­ing her­self both an adept com­ic and dra­mat­ic per­former with­out ever set­tling into a com­fort­able groove.

You get the feel­ing with Arter­ton that she has long craved the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sink her teeth into more the­mat­i­cal­ly meaty mate­r­i­al, and British writer/​director Dominic Sav­age duly oblig­es with The Escape – not a low-rent action flick as its rather naff title sug­gests, but a beau­ti­ful­ly com­posed, qui­et­ly dev­as­tat­ing por­trait of a woman on the verge of a ner­vous breakdown.

Arter­ton is Tara, an ordi­nary house­wife whose pas­sion­less mar­riage to bread­win­ner Mark (Dominic Coop­er), cou­pled with her antipa­thy towards their two young chil­dren, is begin­ning to take its emo­tion­al toll. Although the cou­ple have built a life of rel­a­tive com­fort and secu­ri­ty togeth­er on the out­skirts of Lon­don, this is no longer enough for Tara, who yearns for new expe­ri­ences – any­thing to break the joy­less dai­ly cycle of one-way sex and school runs.

She’s mis­er­able, burn­ing with resent­ment and vis­i­bly con­flict­ed. But she des­per­ate­ly needs change. So one day Tara hops on the train into town, where­upon she picks up an old book on medieval tapes­tries from a flea mar­ket. One art­work in par­tic­u­lar, a 16^th cen­tu­ry piece known as ​‘The Lady and the Uni­corn’, catch­es her eye, and a cur­so­ry google reveals it is cur­rent­ly on dis­play at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. Mark shows lit­tle inter­est, how­ev­er, bare­ly con­ceal­ing his amuse­ment when Tara sug­gests enrolling her­self in an art class.

Final­ly Tara plucks up the courage to pack her bags and heads straight for the French cap­i­tal, only to cop off with the first tall dark stranger who tells her she’s pret­ty, the (pre­sum­ably unin­tend­ed) impli­ca­tion being that what she need­ed all along was a good, guilt-free fuck. It’s a dis­ap­point­ing­ly clichéd and reduc­tive con­clu­sion to an oth­er­wise intel­li­gent char­ac­ter study pow­ered by a career-best per­for­mance from Arterton.