NO SUCH THING

Rating: 4

You have to take filmmaker Hal Hartly on his own terms. His is a vision of deliberately slow pacing, and dialogue that is spare but pithy, rife with wit. As a result, his deliciously eccentric, stylized films are like no one else’s. You either love them or you hate them. It’s as simple as that. For the record, I love them.
NO SUCH THING, his latest film, takes as its conceit the story of beauty and the beast, though it’s about as far from Disney’s take on the tale as the Peanuts gang is from Aida. Our beast, though, is every bit as world-weary as the one from the fairy tale, what with being older than the human race, the which he considers a waste of the universe’s efforts. It’s rendered him introspective. Plus he’s not aging well, though still a fearsome short-tempered, firing-breathing gargoyle of a creature, the horns erupting from his leathery brow and chin are a bit worse for wear. As we meet him, he’s in his lair, an abandoned missile silo in the most unreachable part of Iceland, musing on how long it’s taking him to kill people these days and how depressing that is. And he’s doing this musing into a tape recorder by a TV crew, the ones that took so long to kill. For reasons that we will discover later, he wants the world to know that he exists. The TV crew, well, he was just having a bad day, it was nothing personal.
Enter Beatrice, played by spoon-eyed Sarah Polley, the impossibly innocent and idealistic beauty, albeit one wearing pigtails and a blue jumper, who listens to the tape. She’s the assistant to network TV producer Helen Mirren, a beast of another stripe, also short-tempered, equally contemptuous of her fellow humans, and certainly fire-breathing with the constant flow of invectives that spring from her severely lipsticked mouth and the endless smoke from her cigarettes. When Beatrice volunteers to go in search of the beast and the TV crew, one of which was her fiancé, Mirren send her off with a good riddance to bad rubbish attitude as she ponders the demographics that might be interested in a real-life monster. Beatrice’s journey becomes a test of her mettle as she endures plane wrecks, medical science, the beast himself, and television wardrobe stylists.
Hartley sets his fable in the near future, when the Federal government is on strike, the president is suicidal, and domestic terrorism is up. Sad, comments Mirren on that last, but not a catastrophe. His stern direction choreographs his actors into formal compositions whose lack of melodrama throw the story into hyper-relief and enhances such gems of dialogue as “the ingénue has spirited him away.” And through this careful construction he has the antics of the beast explode with a rumbling voice and a shambling gait that convey the acme of discontent and insouciant misanthropy.
Robert John Burke, a return Hartley collaborator, imbues the beast with a fearsome attitude even when charmed by the beauty of the piece. He also brings an unexpected charisma to all that prosthetic make-up. Added to the usual Hartley company of players are ci-mentioned Mirren at her icily brittle best, Baltasar Kormákur, as a mad scientist with the soul of a dyspeptic poet and Julie Christie, as an Icelandic doctor who nurtures Beatrice body and soul. Christie has never been better, looking for all the tell-tale signs of maturity as striking as she did in the 60s, her eyes glinting with a protective steel and yet also with a tenderness too fragile for this world.
NO SUCH BEAST takes on much in its 103 minutes and takes it on well. If it never quite engages us emotionally, it nevertheless tickles our collective cerebrum in ways that prevent us feeling the lack. Is it a metaphor for humankind’s place contemporary civilization? Is it a meditation on moral relativism? Is it a trenchant take on the media? Or perhaps a study of innocence and corruption? In a word, yes.