Still Life
Rated M
Director: Uberto Pasolini
HHHI
Reviewed by Craig Mattieson
THERE is a character we've become familiar with in the movies: the middle-aged man who is circumspect, precise and alone.
His greetings are formal, his blank face a mask. In independent dramas he is someone cut off from life's possibilities, secretly awaiting discovery.
In mainstream thrillers he secretly has a kidnapped young woman in his basement, hoping to avoid discovery.
Uberto Pasolini's Still Lifeis very much the former, but it subverts expectations in a way that is rewarding.
The story of London council worker John May (Eddie Marsan), who searches for the distant friends and family of those who die alone and unclaimed in his borough.
It's a film about loneliness and the struggle for companionship that comes with a solemn metaphysical twist.
Eddie Marsan has a familiar if unlikely face. It's square and intent, with an exclamatory nose, and he's been everything from a furious driving instructor in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky to Inspector Lestrade alongside Robert Downey Jr's Sherlock Holmes.
Here he is scrupulous in communicating John's isolation, working with the dead and living alone, but never resorts to sentimentality. In some ways this is a detective story at one point John finds photo negatives and has them developed, searching for a clue but it is a quiet, disillusioned one.
From the ramshackle home of the late Billy Stokes, an alcoholic misfit who lay dead and undiscovered for weeks, John slowly finds people who previously knew the deceased, hoping that for once he won't be the only person at the funeral. His dedication infuriates his unctuous boss (Andrew Buchan), who represents a modern world that has no time for those who have passed.
Producer-turned-director Pasolini keeps his camera locked still, with John entering and exiting the frame as if unnoticed, and sums up a film about the struggle to find and maintain genuine relationships with family and friends in an efficient, uncaring society.
As he learns about Billy Stokes from those who knew, including Kelly (Downton Abbey's Joanne Froggatt), there's a sense that it will allow John, who by his efforts to posthumously reunite families displays an orphan's hope, to be reborn.
But the film remains emotionally constrained, without a cathartic release. Not everyone will have the patience for what transpires, but the poignant discipline of Still Life has an unexpected pay-off. It's not a twist that changes everything, but rather one that reveals what has been happening all along.
