brilliantlove

brilliantlove
Starring: Liam Browne, Nancy Trotter Landry
Director: Ashley Horner
Rating: 1 (out of five)

Summary: Manchester is a novice photographer, Noon, a shy taxidermist. Over a sweltering summer, Manchester documents their love affair, creating wonderfully charged, erotic images. Then he gets discovered - and the art world closes in on their idyll. Can this intimate, carnal relationship survive public exposure?

Where to start with brilliantlove? Likened to Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs with less Franz Ferdinand - which could only be a good thing - the story of a neurotic taxidermist and her ice pop dildo loving photographer boyfriend spends more time tucking on cocks than the heartstrings.

In all fairness, Director Ashley Horner doesn't have much to work with and he does manage to create interesting, dreamlike, summertime images out of the remnants of a turgid script which tries to comment on the exploitative nature of the art world but instead creates caricatures as readily as a Blackpool Pier cartoonist. Main protagonists Noon (Trotter Landry) and Manchester (Browne) for instance are naive to the point of extreme irritation - spending their days finding dead animals to stuff and indulging in self obsession and onanism. They vaguely sit halfway between 1970's hippie cliches and modern day East London fashion zombies and are doubling frustrating as that sounds.

Holding the film together are the much vaunted sex scenes and they are of an extremely strong nature - with the human body and all the fluids therein shown in all their effervescent glory. But the babbling nonsense spoken by Noon and Manchester whilst indulging themselves means they never touch the erotic nature of the body or even get close to showing "brilliantlove", in fact any point trying to be made about the true nature of love is simply an after thought.

By the time Manchester's innocent "art" is hijacked by filthy rich, cold capitalists - in the guise of pornographers if you were struggling to keep up with the labyrinthine metaphors - the couple's reckless abandonment becomes sexually stranger and even more irritatingly surreal. Although for all the masturbating over each other, catching frogs in buckets and taking of mind bending drugs in wooded areas, it all seems rather cliched and pedestrian, which is another problem with Sean Conway's lightweight script which wants to be controversial for controversials sake.

Brilliantlove is nominated for a Raindance Award at the British Independent Film Awards and good luck to it, because in a category that awards films "made against the odds", Director Ashley Horner certainly deserves it. I don't believe the point with brilliantlove was to side with the obvious villains of the piece but you wouldn't mind if Noon and Manchester were taught a tough lesson about life and love, and taught it quite aggressively. Maybe a few times. Via a Peeping Tom style tripod fitted with dildos.

OUT November 12