Unrelated
Originally published without a star rating in Issue 9 (‘Summer Movies’) of VHS Tracking, a zine edited by Tristan Fidler which is in the format of those ‘We Recommend…’ pamphlets once available in video rental stores. You can buy the zine at Highgate Continental and The Bird in Perth, Sticky Institution in Melbourne, or by contacting vhstrackingzine@gmail.com.
Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007)
★★★★
Films about summer are often films about sex. It makes sense: people become somewhat delirious in the heat, and they dress closer to nakedness than at any other time of year. For those who can afford it – and in films, they can usually afford it – summer is also the time for vacation. During these few days or weeks, it’s hoped that the reality of everyday life won’t interfere with the fantasy of endless leisure. People swim, sunbathe, sleep in, stay up, drink, dance, have sex. Time hardly matters, until it’s time to go home.
But sex doesn’t materialise in Joanna Hogg’s film Unrelated, in which a married 45-year-old woman called Anna (Kathryn Worth) travels to the Tuscan countryside, sans husband, to join her schoolfriend’s upper-middle-class family vacation. There she quickly falls for her friend’s nephew, Oakley (Tom Hiddleton), an attractive and overconfident young man barely of adult age. Anna starts hanging out with Oakley and his teenage posse rather than with her own middle-aged friends. As the risk of shame and embarrassment hovers closely by, an unlikely summer affair becomes less and less unlikely.
When Anna invites Oakley back to her room halfway through the film, he turns her down. It hurts her deeply and unearths the ingrained issues in her life and marriage. But she sticks it out until the end, even staying behind awhile after everyone goes home. In the final scene, Anna is in a taxi heading back to the airport. She’s speaking on the phone to her husband, as she’s been doing throughout the vacation, though usually only to argue. But this time she’s lively and smiling, and seems refreshed. The spell of summer, which had promised her far too much, appears to have been broken.