\tOn the face of it, Lucy does not seem like the kind of person who would go on a spiritual retreat. She\u2019d probably agree with that herself. But she\u2019d like to be, and so she struggles through the enforced silences and the sharing sessions, hoping to attain a kind of enlightenment she doesn\u2019t really believe in. An embittered former teen actor, played by Jennifer Connelly with the scorched, brittle air of one steadily checking out of polite society, her thorny aura is an ill fit for the expensive Oregon sanctuary she\u2019s signed up for, all hushed meditation and touchy-feely trust exercises, and this energy-based conflict gives Alice Englert\u2018s strange, alluring satirical drama \u201cBad Behaviour\u201d an immediate pull of intrigue \u2014 vibes so discordantly violent, one feels they have to give way to something physical and drastic. \t \tAt the film\u2019s rough midpoint, they do \u2014 in ways that confirm the startling, admirable severity and bluntness of Englert\u2019s first feature as a director, and also bring it to a head that its slightly softer, more conventionally oddball second half can\u2019t live up to. At first the film alternates the stories of Lucy and her adult daughter Dylan (played by Englert herself) to form a bifurcated portrait of women whose desires are increasingly incompatible with their chosen environment; once it brings the characters together, for a study of wary family bonding under dire circumstances, it loses its crisp dramatic and thematic definition. Still, this is an original and auspicious work from the New Zealander \u2014 carrying at least some shared DNA with the ashy black comedy of early films by Englert\u2019s mother Jane Campion (who makes a brief cameo appearance here). \t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \t\u201cBad Behaviour\u201d is notable, too, as an unusually rangy and risky showcase for Connelly, an actor who may have recently scored career-high box office in \u201cTop Gun: Maverick,\u201d but whose pensive, nervy screen presence has been too rarely tested by Hollywood in the two decades since she won an Oscar for \u201cA Beautiful Mind.\u201d Here, she\u2019s subtly but vividly agitated from the jump, already bristling with quiet malaise and discomfort in her own skin when we meet her driving to Oregon, calling Dylan from the car to warn her that she\u2019s going to be out of reach for, well, however long a paid-for epiphany takes to arrive. Dylan, a movie stuntwoman at work on a shoot in New Zealand, sounds neither surprised nor concerned: The dispassionate tone between them makes clear that mother and daughter are at least alike in their self-containment. \t \tThe retreat is both spartan and elevated, presided over by a spiritual leader \u2014 the unprepossessingly named Elon \u2014 who\u2019s disarmingly straightforward, but also serene in a way that suggests some manner of superior knowledge. Eschewing cult-leader clich\u00e9 for a plummy everyday friendliness that eventually circles round to sinister, Ben Whishaw cleverly plays Elon as equal parts guru and grifter: His counsel is sometimes obvious, but what the person needs to hear just the same. Englert\u2019s script avoids easy mockery of spiritual seeking and those who pursue it, but does find cool, splintery comedy in the notion of one-size-fits-all therapeutic techniques, which alienate Lucy further from a group in which she already feels unsettled. \tThe bulk of her aggravation lands, not entirely undeservingly, on new arrival Beverly (a canny Dasha Nekrasova), a vacuous celebrity model who openly fears the loss of her youth and influence; as someone now shorn of both, Lucy can offer her harsher home truths than Elon. Beginning as passive-aggressive before the \u201cpassive\u201d part is rather boldly chipped away, this flinty, often very funny standoff between the two women gives Lucy\u2019s half of the narrative a snap and tension that Dylan\u2019s, mostly revolving around her tentative romance with unavailable actor Elmore (Marlon Williams), lacks. But the two portraits are complementary nonetheless, each perceptive about the balance women are expected to find between emotional honesty and smiling reserve. Simon Price\u2019s curt editing sharply exposes these parallels, while Matt Henley\u2019s chilly, misty lensing often situates mother and daughter in the same light and air, even as they\u2019re supposedly half a world apart. (The whole production was, in fact, shot in New Zealand.) \tFollowing the film\u2019s exhilaratingly unexpected climax, Lucy and Dylan\u2019s eventual reunion turns it into a staider, talkier affair. But even then, some of the talk is witty and instructive, building toward a resolution that, if not happy, feels conciliatory and hard-earned, while true to its characters\u2019 flaws and vanities. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to forgive me,\u201d Lucy says to her daughter, \u201cand then forgive yourself for taking so long to forgive me.\u201d Spiritual enlightenment thus juts up against toxic narcissism \u2014 recognizing that people can only change so much, Englert\u2019s debut finds what crumpled catharsis it can in the best of their bad moments. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the face of it, Lucy does not seem like the kind of person who would go on a spiritual retreat. She\u2019d probably agree with that herself. But she\u2019d like to be, and so she struggles through the enforced silences and the sharing sessions, hoping to attain a kind of enlightenment she doesn\u2019t really believe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/ita\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}