The Private Life of a Modern Woman, Venice Film Festival review: a pompous chore
There was a scuffle to get into the screening of James Toback’s new film at Venice earlier today, which was tucked away in the fun-sized, 149-seater Sala Casinò. About 10 minutes in, there was almost a fully blown riot going on to get out.
What a pompous chore it is – just 71 minutes long, but so toenail-tweakingly pleased with itself, and so replete with pseud-ish posturing, that by the end it feels as if the whole thing must have been playing at quarter-speed. It is built around a plausible, commanding and deeply felt performance from Sienna Miller that would be worth watching under any other imaginable circumstances. But not these ones.
Miller plays Vera Lockman, a famous actress who lives alone in a plush Manhattan loft, and whom we’re introduced to during a fitful night’s sleep. She’s dreaming of accidentally shooting her drug-dealing ex-boyfriend (Nick Mathews) in her living room, during a scuffle with a handgun, then calling the police, panicking, and hanging up. It’s heavily suggested, though never conclusively confirmed, that all of the above did actually take place, and that her ex’s body is currently stashed in a designer trunk in her hallway, a bit like the dismembered old man under the floorboards in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
How could she be capable of such callousness? “I’m a modern woman,” she later tells her dementia-afflicted grandfather (Charles Grodin) in an unrelated (or is it?) context. “A modern woman, eh?” he replies. “Oh boy!” Oh boy indeed. The film opens with Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony cranked to ear-tearing volumes while Toback’s camera pores over Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights – fathomless beauty, perversion and wrath bound up in a single triptych – a copy of which is hung on Vera’s living room wall. That’s women for you, apparently.
Vera wants to try her hand at writing, so she uses the incident as inspiration for a short story she scribbles in a notebook in the third person – and which serves in turn as the film’s own voiceover track, which Miller performs.
“Fiction or non-fiction?” asks Vera’s filmmaker friend Franklin, who pops round for a long and unbearably flatulent discussion about the art and business of writing. Franklin is played by Toback himself, who looks like a frog in a trilby, and whose rambling dialogue sounds like the filmmaker’s own scarcely ordered thoughts on his own job. Warming to his theme, Franklin goes on to sustainedly probe Vera about her sex life, in an exchange so excruciating I almost bit through my fist.
Some other visitors pop by too: a second lover, with a thesis on literary murders ("between Dostoyevsky and Dickens") bundled under his arm, and later on, an Inspector Goole-like policeman, played by Alec Baldwin, who is clearly convinced Vera has something to do with her ex’s disappearance. With a red-for-guilty pashmina knotted round her neck, we’ve watched Vera drag the trunk to her car and drive it to a river, where it’s summarily disposed of – though with Poe and Dostoyevsky having been referenced, that naturally isn’t the end of it.
It’s been a while since Toback has got a non-fiction film off the ground: in fact, his last feature, the droll documentary Seduced and Abandoned, was about the difficulty these days of doing exactly that. Perhaps that’s why large portions of this film feel like scenes Toback just wanted to use up somehow – particularly the Grodin sequence, in which his character rails against his fading faculties by turns sweetly and violently, and which might have been moving if it didn't feel so detached from everything around it.
There is also a cameo from the notorious corporate raider Carl Icahn, who plays himself, and which feels like – well, goodness only knows what it feels like. A favour? A repaid debt? Perhaps it’s the art-house equivalent of Donald Trump in the foyer in Home Alone 2. Miller creditably weathers it all with unflappable poise and composure – but there’s little evidence of either woman or life, private or otherwise, in this fantastically tiresome project.
