At first, Splendid Isolation, Urszula Atoniak’s latest film, looks like it’s going to be a retread of 2009’s Nothing Personal, her first one. Nothing Personal might even have been called Splendid Isolation and its MO was the same – a couple of people, a female focus, a remote location, self-sufficiency, personal histories mired in mystery, with flat grey skies and the whole thing shot on a 16mm film camera with half an eye on the picturesque.
Here we start with two young women on beach. One of them appears to be rolling around in the waves on what looks like a cold day. Are they playing or have they just washed ashore? The young women decide, against any real logic, to play hide and seek. It’s going to be one of those allegorical films, it seems. And learning that these two people have almost similar names – Hannah (Anneke Sluiters) and Anna (Khadija El Kharraz Alami) – only reinforces the impression.
In the course of the game – all of it observed by a drone hovering overhead – Anna finds an abandoned house and has soon brought Hannah there. This is not just any old beach house, it’s an arthouse beach house, all cast concrete and eccentric angles and set off all on its own, in splendid isolation, as are Anna and Hannah.
Are we in a version of Antonioni’s L’Avventura (an island, a mystery) or something more in the realm of Tarkovsky? Both seem possible as points of reference, and as with all of Antoniak’s films (this is the fourth I’ve seen, out of six, so I’m not hanging too far over a ledge), a fairytale structure seems to be hovering somewhere below the surface, as if we’re not meant to take what we see too literally, or not without learning something from it, at least.
The beach house would possibly be a gingerbread house in another setting, with Hannah and Anna a latterday Hansel and Gretel. Hannah is red of hair and pale of skin (not unlike Lotte Verbeek in Nothing Personal) and ailing. Anna is her minder, her nurse, or takes on that role, and has soon made the sensible decision to relocate to the house. She collects crabs and then teaches Hannah how to eat them. She makes sure Hannah takes her medication. She ensures the rifle is loaded when a solitary, androgynous stranger suddenly starts making their presence felt.
Till now this has been a fascinating castaway thriller, of sorts, with muted visuals – pastels not oils – a soundtrack full of Vivaldi at his most plaintively baroque, and a sound design that emphasises isolation and the rawness of this windswept idyll. Which is how Antoniak originally intended it to be, but then Covid arrived and she nudged the story towards the more purely allegorical.
So maybe Hannah and Anna are both dead and are in purgatory, where angels (the drone) watch over them, while death (the stranger) hovers just over a nearby sand dune. Other readings are available.
Antoniak has a new DP, Myrthe Mosterman, who injects touches of the gothic here and there, amplifying images – of Hannah on a bed, of Anna holding Hannah, Pietà style – till they become like baroque icons, entirely in keeping with Antoniak’s decision to present death as erotic, in some way at least. In this story death (or Death) does not arrive with a sharp scythe but with a boyish haircut and what looks like an eye for Hannah.
The actors all give self-contained performances that don’t particularise too much, which in the case of the striking Sluiters – a shock of hair, a gash of mouth – is a feat, and they’re all light as air even when weightiness is the conceptual idea. This film is only short. Again, like most Antoniak movies it’s around the 80 minute mark. But it flies along at a remarkable rate, a nimble balance of the conceptual with the entertaining (pretty women, striking views). After what feels like about 15 minutes it’s suddenly coming to an end, with a reveal that isn’t any surprise at all, but is no less tender and emotional for all that.
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
