Director Jon Sanders and his loose ensemble of actors, led above all by his wife, Anna Mottram, who basically improvises all her own dialogue, have been tending their own little peculiar plot of cinematic garden for few films now, starting with Painted Angels and progressing up through Late September and Back to the Garden.
Most of the time, these ultra-low-budget, ultra-rarefied films are about people like, one presumes, Sanders and Mottram themselves: highly educated, haute bourgeois Brits and Europeans with cultural capital to spare, endlessly fascinated with examining themselves, their relationships, their art. Here, the result is more contortedly self-reflexive than usual as regular player Bob Goody plays a dramatic impresario who has enlisted his own wife (Mottram) and two other women (Meret Becker and Maxine Finch) to play avatars of the same woman at different stages of their life together.
There’s much searching of souls, long takes that pan slowly around rooms, and studied compositions featuring all the rustic, decorative trappings of French farmhouses, like a Country Living spread come to life.
Some might find it all utterly insufferable, but, if you’re receptive to the work of Joanna Hogg (Archipelago) and other miniaturists of this sort, this is pretty good stuff. The best bits are exactly the times when the characters don’t talk, like a long sequence in which a puppet dances tenderly with each woman in turn and later on when folk “play” an array of crystal glasses filled with water.
