THE OUTRUN (B) - Every generation gets the "Days of Wine and Roses" it deserves. This one is more "Days of Sea Lions and Seaweed," but it gets the job done.
Saiorse Ronan turns in an understated but powerful and believable performance as a 29-year-old woman struggling to stay sober by leaving her London party scene and returning to the Scottish isles near where she grew up (with a pair of challenging parents). She communes with nature as a way to smother the desire to drink, with mixed results but with a clearer mind -- not only about her sobriety but also her eventual path in life.
Nora Fingscheidt, who seems to specialize in films about wild-card females ("The Unforgivable"), helps adapt a novel by Amy Liptrot, unspooling the story of Rona, splintering the narrative with flashbacks that can be a little difficult to follow but help illustrate Rona's jangled brain (and explain how she destroyed a relationship with a sweet partner (Paapa Essiedu)). Her mom (Saskia Reeves) and a gang of Jesus freaks annoy Rona, but the daughter is particularly triggered by her bipolar father (Stephen Dillane), whose mood swings spiral her back to childhood traumas, especially when he cocoons in bed, unresponsive.
Rona not only assists on the family farm but also helps conduct a head-count of the rare corn crake. She learns to appreciate the small joys in life, like a peek-a-boo swim with sea lions and learning the healthful benefits of seaweed. You sense that she has gotten her life on track, even if she has a long scuffle ahead staying sober.
MARIANNE (C+) - It has come to this. The culmination of my cinematic viewing and reviewing existence. Ninety minutes of pure, uncut Isabelle Huppert -- just her, and only her, addressing the camera. With that mesmerizing mask of a face, she could have been, as they say, reading the phone book for an hour and a half, and I would have forked over $10 to see it.
It turns out she reads from a rambling script (apparently) from newcomer Michael Rozek, who trains his camera inertly on Huppert seated on a couch as she unspools a disjointed monologue with a meta theme that dares you to keep watching. Huppert mainly addresses the camera when not flipping pages in the script she relies on, and she has an unmatched ability to pierce the screen and the illusion of cinema and seem to teleport into the movie theater and communicate directly with you.
She mocks the concept of a narrative and plays with the idea that she will be taken as an elitist for engaging in such a (mock) vanity project (featuring her self-aware high-brow references to jazz's Thelonious Monk and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky). It's a one-woman high-wire act that few others could attempt, let alone pull off. She is droll at times, and it's fun to study her at length. I enjoyed trying to figure out how she manages to convey volumes with her eyes, passing time as she fussed with her hair or struggled to pronounce the word forlorn in her thick French accent. You have to pay close attention in order to catch the sly changes in her blase mien.
Toward the end, Huppert finally gets off the couch but quickly ends up back in (her?) spacious home, this time in front of a mirror reciting an extended passage about love and the "noisy gong" from 1 Corinthians in the Bible. She is quite earnest throughout, and it's hard to tell whether she is truly trying to convey some philosophical ideas or merely engaging in an absurdist lark, winking along with Rozek. She brings it all around with a subtly effective conclusion, and by the end of the 87 minutes, you have either lusciously indulged in all things Isabelle Huppert, or you walked out an hour ago because it was all too flippant to bear. I enjoyed the experience but I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to; thus the grade that might seem lower than this review suggests.
BONUS TRACK
Rona listens to a lot of electronic dance music in her headphones during "The Outrun." But from the end credits, the ever-hopeful and fresh-sounding "This Is the Day," from 1983, by The The:
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