REVIEWS
Take This Waltz D i rected by S A RA H P O L L E Y Sta r r i n g M I CHE LLE W I LLI AM S, S ET H R O GE N, S A RA H S I LV E RM A N Relea se d AUGUST 17 ife has a gap in it. It just does. You don’t go crazy trying to fill it.” So says a recovering alcoholic (played by a very watchable Sarah Silverman) in Sarah Polley’s second feature. It strikes at the film’s heart – whether the gap is between falling head over heels and into a more enduring love (or falling out of it altogether); between settling down and having kids; or between watching your spouse develop Alzheimer’s and inch slowly towards the inevitable. That was the subject of Away From Her, Polley’s impressive first feature, and here she approaches a much younger couple in crisis with an equally heartbreaking lyricism and intelligence. Characters in Take This Waltz who don’t mind the gap tend to come unstuck – not least its 28-year-old protagonist, Margot (a tomboyish, elfin Michelle Williams), a freelance journalist married to loveable, kind-hearted cookery writer Lou (Seth Rogen). When Margot meets an attractive stranger, Daniel (Luke Kirby), on her return from a business trip, she admits to a phobia of the period between check-in and take-off: “I’m afraid of connections… In airports.” This metaphor, a little too on-thenose, is one of several missteps in a film which is otherwise full of perceptive, funny observations about the nature of romantic love and the daily vicissitudes of the human heart.
Following a brief flirtation, Margot discovers Daniel is in fact a close neighbour. With temptation lurking literally yards away, cracks in Margot and Lou’s loving marriage begin to emerge. Polley’s camera frames their domestic set-up in revealing tableaux: the TV stares back at the watching couple, glazed with inertia and familiarity; in bed, the camera faces them square on, bearing down on them with mingled intimacy and claustrophobia. Margot’s unspoken frustration tinges the couple’s infantilising baby talk; a running pet joke evolves from, “I love you so much I’m going to… mash your head in with a potato masher” to, “I love you so much I’m going to… rape you with a knife until you bleed to death”. The unconsummated passion between Daniel and Margot, who begin a chaste affair, is likewise sublimated, which creates a heightened eroticism expressed not through action but charged words, gestures and glances. Set in Toronto, Polley’s hometown, and infused with the over-saturated pastels of a sweltering summer in Margot’s Boho neighbourhood, the film sometimes risks looking like a feature-length ad for Hipstamatic, and its attention to detail sometimes feels a little mannered (Daniel, for starters, is a rickshaw driver-cum-aspiring artist). 062
That said, there are moments of real poetry, including the dreamy impressionism of sequences showing Margot caught in the giddy oblivion of a fairground ride. When Polley finally deploys the Leonard Cohen song of the film’s title, she risks being outshone by a more consummate Canadian artist, but this is a bold film, alive to its own ambiguities and supported by fine lead performances from Rogen and Williams. As in Away From Her, Polley confronts a ‘gap’ that most conventional dramas overlook altogether, and refuses to turn her head. SOPHIE IVAN
ANTICIPATION . It’s been six years since Polley’s distinctive first feature, which set the bar high. ENJOYMENT. Though occasionally punctured by selfconsciousness, this is emotionally layered, probing drama. IN RETR O SPECT. Committed and resonant, Take This Waltz gets under your skin – and feels a lot like the work of an auteur in the making.