Starring Viv Albertine and Liam Gillick
Written and directed by Joanna Hogg
UK 2013
104 minutes
Our last movie was The Lady Eve - a laugh-a-minute screwball comedy about a female confidence trickster and her millionaire target. In that film the dialogue is lightning fast and the action at times slapstick. Exhibition also portrays the relationship between a man and a woman but the characters could not be more different nor the style more contrasting.
Joanna Hogg's third feature is a beautifully composed and ultra-minimalist portrait of a middle class marriage. D and H are the husband and wife played respectively by Viv Albertine (one time member of punk band The Slits) and Liam Gillick (a Turner Prize nominated artist) They live in a stylish, glacial, architect-designed home in west London, from which they are reluctantly moving out.
The rituals and wrinkles of their daily lives are documented with an unnerving gaze by Hogg. The result is a compelling, sometimes deeply uncomfortable study which explores the surfaces and the silences of their domestic world as well as the introverted eroticism that permeates their exchanges.
The director was mentored by Derek Jarman before working in television for some years. Her second feature was Archipelago - a tale of seething family tensions on a holiday in the Scilly Isles. It established her as a singular talent in new British cinema.
Joanna Hogg's films are not to everyones taste but they have a singular vision and get to the heart of a very particular kind of British experience with unerring and surgical precision.
