AN IMPERFECT MURDER
US, 2017, 72 minutes, Colour.
Sienna Miller, Alec Baldwin, Charles Grodin, Colleen Camp, John Buffalo Mailer, Nick Matthews, James Toback.
Directed by James Toback.
While it looks as if it might be a popular thriller, this is a film more for an arthouse audience – and the many denunciations by viewers, especially on the IMDb, indicate that it is not for a popular audience.
It might have fared better with its original title, The Private Life of a Modern Woman.
It is been directed by James Toback, controversial writer and director for many decades, beginning with such films as Fingers and moving into themes of gambling, desperate relationships. In fact, he appears early in this film as a film writer and filmmaker, having a conversation with the central character, Vera (Siena Miller), asking her all kinds of personal and existential questions about the meaning of life, her aims, her fears, pain, suicidal thoughts… Questions which are very personal, it would seem, to the director himself.
This is very brief film but is made up of a variety of episodes, many of which could stand alone.
The impact of the film depends on audience response to Vera and to Siena Miller’s screen presence and performance. She is disturbed in her sleep, a nightmare, wakes to find that the nightmare has been a reality. However, there is a question of how much is reality and how much is her writing the story, the audience hearing it in extended voice-over. A past lover, an unreliable drug dealer, has come out of prison, comes to her apartment, threatens her, there is an altercation, he has a gun, draws it, they struggle, she gets the gun, the intruder is shot. In her dilemma, she is confused. However, she puts his body in a huge chest – and, the next day, drags it down from her apartment, along the street in full view, rather a distance, to her car, where two men help her to put the trunk in the boot. She drives extensively, goes to a pier, drags the chest and pushes it into the river.
And, so, the audience asks is this meant to be real, is it in Vera’s imagination, is at her literary/fictional view of what happened. And, throughout the film, especially in the different episodes as she talks to the different characters, there are flashbacks to the intrusion.
Her first visitor is a man with whom she is in a relationship, who has completed his thesis on murder in Dostoevsky and Dickens and asks her opinion, she is brusque with him and he leaves. Then she is visited by the filmmaker, an extended sequence, philosophical questions and the equivalent of a monologue by Vera.
The next episode is from a police Inspector played by Alec Baldwin. She is calm, she plays off him well, is able to answer all his questions even as he tries to incriminate her.
The next episode is quite different, very much stand-alone. Vera has referred to her mother and her grandfather and they have been invited to a meal. This is a very different, congenial Vera. Colin Camp is her mother. But, stealing the scene is Charles Grodin as her grandfather, suffering from dementia. It was Charles Grodin’s last screen performance and is well worth seeing as he communicates the bewilderment of dementia, of scattered memories, of loss of memory, of some despair as he remembers his mother. This sequence certainly makes the film worthwhile.
There is a brief episode when a friend of the grandfather’s briefly visits Vera and they have something of a conversation – but it is cut short.
There is continued voice-over, Vera having manifested her character through the interactions with her visitors – and, as she looks out the window, there is the police investigator and the sound of sirens.
Audiences responding to their perceptions of the realism of the film and characters have denounced it as unwatchable, worst film… On the other hand, taking it is a very stylised piece, dialogue oriented, raising all kinds of personal and existential questions, it might be worth considering.
