Seeing this movie was my initiation to the IFI (Irish Film Institute.) The IFI is the sort of cinematheque that all cities should have, and not enough do. There are two relatively small screening rooms up a flight of stairs with plush seats arranged in semi-circular rows. The viewings change weekly, sometimes daily. Occasionally there are free screenings of older (not necessarily old, by any means) movies and they also organize smaller film festivals. The showings are mostly independent and international films.
Hallam Foe is a Scottish movie about a 17 year old boy whose idolized mother either was killed or committed suicide. Hallam would like to believe that his ice queen stepmother arranged for his mother’s death so she could marry his father, whose secretary she was at the time. In one of the most bizarrely manipulative and pathetic scenes I have ever seen, Hallam and his stepmother have sex, and he flees the family’s large country estate for Edinburgh. After a chance encounter on the street, he becomes obsessed with a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his mother. He talks his way into a dishwashing job at the hotel where she is a personnel manager, spies on her for a while, and they eventually begin an affair. His father and stepmother track down his whereabouts and he has to go back to the country estate to manage some business there (as stipulated by his late mother’s will) where he then nearly drowns his stepmother. Only at this point does he accept maybe mommy wasn’t as perfect as he thought, rescues his stepmother before it’s too late, and moves on with his life.
Generally speaking, this is a weird little movie full of weird little people. Hallam is by far the weirdest, but that might also be because you see the most of him. People give him more chances in more ways than would normally be considered reasonable, but I suppose a strange little movie needs strange little somethings to further the plot along (if stepmother sex weren’t strange enough.)
The kind of insane, antisocial weirdness so matter of fact in this movie is what makes it unreasonable, unrealistic, and unromantic from the start. I’m not sure if it was meant to be another one of those quirky dysfunctional family/coming of age dramas, but everyone was so unsympathetic that any sort of character growth was mitigated by all the external hoopla.
Am I glad I saw it? Ask me when I spy on that obscure motherly object of desire from rooftops while she’s screwing a co-worker who’s cheating on his wife.
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