Film review: Trance
John Campbell
Fashions come and go in the cinema, but some things have proved to be as regular and reliable as Black Caviar.
The minute that Rosario Dawson appeared as a Harley Street hypnotherapist, modestly dressed in colourless slacks and long-sleeved blouse, with her hair pulled back tightly, I thought to myself ‘I wonder when she’s going to get her gear off?’ And sure enough… we had to wait a little bit longer than normal for the bankable sex scene, but Rosario’s voluptuous full frontal nudity only served to undermine the hyper-cranial pretentions of yet another trendy brain-strain concoction.
Or, as director Danny Boyle might argue, ‘a bit of soft porn goes a long way’. It is impossible to watch this without thinking of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film most slavishly praised by those who had no idea of what it was about – the goal usually striven for by French philosophers.
A rare Goya has been offered for sale at the London auction house where Simon (James McAvoy) works. A gang of art thieves led by Franck (Vincent Cassel) pull off a daring raid in which Simon takes an amnesia-inducing blow to the head – and the masterpiece goes missing.
Elizabeth (Dawson), more willing than you might expect from a doctor of such high standing, then gets involved with the crooks in unraveling Simon’s suppressed memory and locating the canvas. Boyle goes beyond traditional sleight of hand in creating his mystery, preferring the cheap option of withholding too much in order to impress with the surprise ending.
McAvoy never looks comfortable in the part as he struggles to get a handle on just who exactly Simon is, while Cassel cruises through the mire with frosty Gallic detachment – even when he gets half of his skull blown away. For all its labyrinthine plotting, what we are left with is yet more tits’n’arse and violence, supplemented by a lot of very loud music intended to pump up the stress and excitement.
If you are happy to equate complexity with profundity, you’ll love it.
