Unrelated

Unrelated

Unrelated

Trailer—Unrelated

source: Unrelated

This movie is a complete waste of time. Even the title has nothing to do with the movie itself... May be that was it unrelated - to anything that goes on in the movie. It gets any stars at all cause of the nice location and the scandal Tom Hiddleston's character had with his dad... But barely.

I'll start right off by saying this movie won't be for everyone. It's a very slow movie, the kind where you're watching people NOT say things for hours and where there's minimal plot. But it's also the type of movie where if you connect with the characters you REALLY connect with them and for me it was a pleasure to spend time with these characters. The main character of Hogg's Unrelated is Anna a woman who is in the early stages of middle age. Anna and her husband have been invited by her oldest friend Verena to join Verena's family and extended family (made up of three adults and four teenagers) in a villa in the Italian countryside where they spend their summers. Only Anna shows up without her partner and soon enough, rather than spend time with the "olds" Anna is adopted into the friend group of the "youngs", the teens that are young enough to be her children. Drinking and getting high irresponsibly she forms a light flirtation with Oakley, the ring leader of the pack who, despite his youth, has an air of authority and control which stands out in contrast to the somewhat shy and nervous Anna. For those willing to give Unrelated a chance I will say that is one of the finest meditations on adulthood, particularly adult womanhood, I've ever seen. If the first half of the film is Anna drifting about with the youngs, innocently capturing a youth she never quite had, the second half is her painful growing up.

Someone once said, "It's the singer, not the song". Here, it's difficult to know which is responsible for the effect created by this film -- the cast, or the writing (and by extension, directing). Certainly, Ms. Hogg deserves credit for her sure, understated camera-work and pithy screenplay. The film demonstrates, in equal measure, both a sense of forward movement (in terms of plot and tension), and a verisimilitude of action and speech. There is a quasi-documentary feel to the proceedings; we enter and view scenes from odd angles, with the camera in a corner, or down a hall from the intended dialogue; scenes begin and end in medias res. The effect is never, however, mannered or jarring, but is calculated for maximum dispatch in terms of character and plot development. However, the performances themselves are so fine, so delicately thatched and inked as to leave the impression of real people, and not "roles" played by professionals. Chief among them is Ms. Worth's turn as Anna, who is not quite as hapless, or feckless, as some of the other reviewers on this site would have indicated. It is interesting to see those viewers' reactions to her pass at the younger Oakley which characterize it as disgusting, or out-of-touch. In another movie (say an Irvine Welsh adaptation, for instance) a woman like Anna would get at least two fairly raunchy sex scenes. This is not to short-change Ms. Worth's physical attractiveness; in fact, the heat between her character and that of Mr. Hiddleston's is palpable. But Ms. Hogg is not after the same sort of effect as Irvine Welsh; this film is a slow-burner. And Ms. Worth finds her footing surely in the lazy Tuscan atmosphere, conveying thousands of words with just a look. Take, for instance, her semi-squint in reaction to Oakley's prying questions about children. The answer is writ large between the drawn-up lower lids, the slight pucker to the mouth. Further to Ms. Worth's credit is that her background is theatre and opera (she has done some choral roles with major productions) neither of which genre is famous for the slight gesture, or subtlety of reading. Here, though, she is "playing chamber music", and not blasting grand opera to the back of the house. All told, this is probably one of the best films to come across this reviewer's screen in the last twenty years.

Anna (Kathryn Worth) is having marital problems and spending the summer holiday family friends Verena (Mary Roscoe), Charlie (Michael Hadley) and George (David Rintoul) at their Tuscan villa. She starts to spend more time with the younger teenage children Archie (Harry Kershaw), Badge (Emma Hiddleston), Jack (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and Oakley (Tom Hiddleston). They smoke some weed and crash a car. The sexual tension boils over as she flirts with the leader of the kids Oakley. It's a British mumbletalk indie. I wish the relationships between the characters are laid out more clearly early on. It would help decipher and build a backstory to their connections if they have any. They need to throw in a few lines like "I haven't seen you since you were this tall." It would help to build tension in the first half of the movie. The older people also need to have some in-depth talk in the first half. It would fill out their characters. Anna has very curt conversations with Verena. This feels like a bunch of strangers and it's not until the second half that things get a little bit interesting.

If you wanted a villa holiday in Tuscany this summer and didn't have time, go to this film and by the end you will feel you have spent a fortnight there. Joanna Hogg has created an upper-middle class version of a Mike Leigh film at his slowest. It's beautifully done, and the fortnight is mostly enjoyable, unless you squirm at the sight of drunken Brits abroad or the sound of the upper-middle classes (I developed a thick skin for both of these a long time ago, myself). The characterisation is subtle, verging on invisible. There's very little intellectual content or sparkling conversation, surely unrealistic in a film about the chattering classes? Perhaps it's the prodigious amount of alcohol that's consumed. All this keeps the focus on Anna, on holiday from her unhappy situation at home, and the cheerfully pie-eyed teenagers that she hangs out with. The movie was very thin on plot, yet there did seem to be inconsistencies on the departure date for some of the party. I doubt I'll watch it again to check this though; once is nice, but enough.

This was a really interesting first film from writer and director Joanna Hogg. Anna, played superbly here by Kathryn Worth in her first film role, arrives to join her old school friend Verena (Mary Roscoe) who is on holiday in a villa in Tuscany with her family and another family in what is clearly an annual arrangement. Anna was supposed to bring her partner Alex with her, but cited his pressure of work as the reason for her arriving alone. In fact, it quickly becomes apparent that Alex and Anna's relationship is in a rocky place, and Anna is in Italy to enjoy a bit of space. The holiday party divided into the old and the young. Anna, whose place should have been with her school friend and 'the olds', gravitated to the more whizzy youngsters with their loud drinking games, skinny dipping, dope smoking and general hell-raising in a battered Fiat, trustingly lent by neighbouring friends. Verena's son Oakley (Tom Hiddleston) began to show an interest in Anna, but he eventually rejected her signals, leaving her struggling to bond with any group. This was a wonderful film about a woman in her mid-life. It was also a telling study of an outsider being pitched into a different world. Verena and her family were well-to-do middle class, but were not an endearing bunch. The older people were insensitive and unfriendly to Anna, who was in need of someone to talk to; the youngsters, let loose from public school, were brash and spoilt. Anyone who has been ignored in a social situation - and there was a wonderful lunch scene here, featuring Mussolini's sofa - will recognise exactly where Joanne Hogg is coming from, and it makes rather uncomfortable viewing for its target audience. It takes Anna's flight to a grim local hotel to finally galvanise Verena into having the conversation she should have had much earlier, in a highly charged scene. But it was the way that this was filmed which made this something out of the ordinary. There were lovely set pieces in the Tuscan countryside, and in Sienna, but the weather was not always sunny, and often there was a wind blowing. Hogg was bold in her approach: at several points, the camera held steady on Anna, even when conversation and action was going on out of shot, and there were long slow scenes. A car crash did not show what happened, but only the vehicle being pulled out of a field by a tow truck, with the (unharmed but shaken) occupants standing about, as one does. A key scene was an almighty row between Oakley and his father George (David Rintoul) which took place inside the villa: we had to join the families sitting about outside, and like them, we were forced to listen to the dangerous raging coming from inside. And we all had to wait to see who came out of the house first, and in what state. The slow pace and art-house style of film will probably annoy and delight audiences in equal measure. I loved it and am very keen to see what Joanna Hogg does next.