The modernist house where artists D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) live in Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition recalls the politician’s retreat in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. Imposing metal and wall-length windows gives the impression of simultaneous transparency and mystery. Also like Polanski, Hogg has a near-total control of the camera as a guiding agent of emotional manipulation. Her static shots generate tension from their duration and unnatural stillness, as well as the mordant comedy that arises from the couple’s settled relationship.
At the start of the movie, for example, a medium shot of D working at her desk is given a claustrophobic feel not by the frigidity of the camera but by the sound design that fills in the world outside the narrow frame. Above D, H toils in his office, and the rolling of his chair on hardwood floors creates an amusing cacophony. Hogg further uses off-screen space to link the two with the couple’s intercoms, used to deliver impersonal requests and messages of affection with all the joy and love of factory PA announcements. Gradually, these humorous glimpses of irritation become the bedrock for their mildly expressed but nonetheless uncomfortable dissatisfaction that finds two long-term lovers finally grating on each other.
The house itself soon becomes the crux of their disagreements. Fearing the rut into which he and D have settled, H proposes selling their house to change things up and possibly inject some surprise back into their relationship. D, on the other hand, cannot imagine parting with the home, which she knows with deep intimacy. Early in the film, some neighbors come over for a meal and only talk about their children, even peering out the window across the way to check in on the kids. Later, D and H go to the neighbors’ place, and D gazes out the window at her building, as if monitoring her own child. But if D fixates on the house, she does not revel in the comfort H wishes to upend. Far more than H, D needs the house for the good of her own artistic expression.
Albertine has to navigate a role that would send more classically skilled actors around the bend with confusion. If D struggles to think up a new performance art piece that fulfills her, that may be because she already subconsciously devotes her efforts to turning her domestic life into a performance. She spends her days roaming around the house as if testing the boundaries of a prison, yet she is the one who wishes to stay there. D’s sexless routine with H, at one point even going as limp as a doll when he attempts to undress her, suggests deeper layers than just boredom or lack of attraction. Rather, her behavior takes on the trappings of conscious symbolism, a willful attempt to act out a part for an unwitting audience of one.
As a member of seminal punk group The Slits, Albertine is no stranger to the power of self-aware iconography and petulant deconstruction. She plays D not as a tortured housewife suffering from a lack of passion but as an unreadable artist posing as that archetype to explore its political ramifications, even if the only people who see it are H and the random passers-by who might catch a glimpse of her posing nude through slitted blinds. If she cannot even conceive of leaving the house, it is primarily because the building is so architecturally in sync with her own subconscious project, a set so well suited to her paradoxically shrouded exhibitionism she couldn’t have designed it better.
D only ever seems to be fitfully aware of this behavior, obliviously devoting her creative energies to this extended work while feeling stymied and uncertain in her deliberately planned displays. Both she and H subsist on drama of their own making, and the funniest and grimmest observation of the film is the possibility that the couple makes waves between each other because they fear contentment. After all, it’s hard to present yourself as an avant-garde challenge to taste when you’re happily participating in that most rusty of acceptable social constructs: committed monogamy. Exhibition is a domestic melodrama in which the drama is not generated organically by a relationship’s flaws but crafted by the people in that relationship to spice it up, even if it threatens to undo everything.
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