Better Things, directed by Duane Hopkins
Rachel McIntyre as Gail. Photo © Bill Rigby
Better Things is Duane Hopkins’s first feature – he’s made a couple of well-received shorts, Field and Love Me or Leave Me Alone, both of which you can see if you register at the BBC’s Film Network. His short films show a distinctive visual and narrative style and a clear sense of place, and I was looking forward to seeing what this British director could do on a wider canvas and working with a more substantial story. Better Things is set somewhere in the Cotswolds, and follows the sex lives, addictions and emotions of a group of alienated young people and three alienated old ones. Rob’s girlfriend Tess has died, presumably of a heroin overdose; Rob continues to seek comfort in the drug, though, as his friends do in speed and in sex, and as Rachel dumps the obsessed Larry for another boyfriend. At the same time, Gail lives trapped at home with her agoraphobia as her nan is brought home from hospital, bedbound. Mr. and Mrs. Gladwin have lost all contact after decades of marriage: they can hardly touch – they’ve become familiar strangers.
There are quite a few good things to say about Better Things. It continues the strong visual style of Hopkins’s shorts – he uses natural light, dogme-style, and trains his camera on characters with a photographic intensity. This is an art film, make no mistake about that. And he brings to the screen a real sense of locality, of a semi-rural backwater England that’s forgotten and forlorn, yet with an incidental beauty: he lingers on views of fields and trees as though to remind us that not everything in this world is bleak. The story-telling style – through cut after cut Hopkins trusts the viewer to build up an understanding of several strands, then manages to keep them in the air – works I think effectively, and combined with the photography gives this film a very unEnglish feel. Jonathan Romney was right in the Independent after it screened at Cannes to call it a ‘Belgian art film’.
The problem with Better Things is that Hopkins merely transposes his short film technique to the longer form without writing in a more compelling narrative, without building in changes of pace and without creating any immediately dramatic scenes. The result is a very slow, very studied piece that in spite of some strong performances – from Rachel McIntyre as Gail, especially - is far from compelling. At an hour and a half it feels far too long. I have to say that performances, admittedly from a mainly new and untrained cast, were not uniformly good, nor was the script strong throughout. Hopkins is a photographer as well as a director, and on this showing the visual trumps the dramatic and narrative in his work to a degree that prevents it becoming mainstream cinema.
Hopkins’s world is also a very bleak one. No one smiles in this film, and any kind of happiness or human contact seems far away: Nan, though and Rob do find a sort of ultimate comfort – and Rob’s story is all the more tragic when you know that the actor Liam McIlfatrick died in September.
I came away disappointed by Better Things, and hope that Hopkins moves on to them with a stronger screenplay and a real plot to work with. See Better Things when you’re in a very artsy and patient mood.
It's released in the UK on 23 January next year.
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