Peter Viney's Blog

Little Joe
2019

Currently on Amazon Prime / BFI Player

Directed by Jessica Hausner
Written by Jessica Hauser & Geraldine Bajard
Soundtrack by Teiji Ito

CAST
Emily Beecham – Alice, a plant breeder
Ben Whishaw- Chris, her assistant
Kerry Fox – Bella, the naysayer
Kit Connor – Joe, Alice’s son
David Wilmot- Karl, boss of the programme
Phoenix Brossard – Ric, her other assistant
Sebastian Hulk- Ivan, Alice’s estranged husband
Lindsay Duncan – psychotherapist
Jessie Mae Alonzo- Selma, Joe’s girlfriend

Released in October 2019 in the UK and December 2019 in the USA, it’s another pandemic failure, but it would have failed anyway. Except in France where it won three prizes including Best Actress at Cannes. No comment.

However, a mysterious virus, everyone in mint green lab coats, people in face masks and gloves in the plant breeding labs make it prophetic of the year to come. Wearing or not wearing a face mask is a plot hinge.

It’s a mash up of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Little Shop of Horrors and Day Of The Triffids, but much less exciting than any of them. It was surprisingly billed as ‘horror’ though nothing horrific happens on screen. Horror is meant to have thrilling tension. I felt no tension, excpt fear that it wouldn’t end soon. It seems VERY long, though it isn’t. The couple of moments of violence are off screen.Were they going for a younger rating? If so, they probably say ‘Fuck!’ too much. I’d say ‘light semi sci-fi.’

The plot without spoilers: Alice is a scientist plant breeder. Her lab is trying to develop a blue tulip thingy (Flash) and her project is a red plant, Little Joe. It is heavily scented and if people keep it warm and talk to it, the plant will make them happy. Her assistants are Cris (Ben Whishaw) and Ric (Phoenix Brossard.) I fear that Ric’s hair style was inspired by Cameron Diaz’s unfortunate “hair gel” in There’s Something About Mary.

Alice lives alone with her son, Joe. Her husband Ivan lives within an easy drive to collect Joe at weekends, though she appears to be in London and he in the Scottish Highlands. It was actually filmed in Austria.

Chris, her assistant, fancies her (Ben Whishaw is not a convincing heterosexual swain). Anyway, the plant has been made sterile as it’s GM. It works out it can spread its genes by “infecting” the brains of humans via its pollen. Though Alice had designed the plant to attract with smell, she has to be shown a diagram of how the olfactory passages work from a magazine. It gradually gets more people. They become strange. They’re only aim is to feed and look after their Little Joe plants. She has taken one home where it infects her son and his girlfriend. Happiness is basically being “bomb happy” or happy clappy. The only person who notices this is Bella, whose dog, Bello (to confuse), is infected and changes. Bella tries to be the whistleblower.

Actually, the only character who felt really creepy was Selma (Jessie Mae Alonzo), Joe’s girlfriend. Over polite, over-remote. Tut, tut, I thought that actor’s parents shouldn’t let her watch so many horror films. She has the style perfectly.

There is a grammar of film production. Like the grammar of a language, it should be invisible, unremarked upon. They teach it at film schools. it’s basic. If you cut between two people talking, and the first is facing right, then on the cut the other is facing left. If someone exits a shot left, then they reappear from the left. Simple stuff.

To be charitable we have to assume that the director here thought it would give an autistic, brittle atmosphere by ignoring the grammar of film rules. To be brutally frank, I just think it’s inept. There are long conversations where they never cut to the second speaker (the reverse). Did they run out of time and decide just to do it the one way? Then there are conversations when we can just about see a bit of two characters on opposite sides of the screen but the camera is looking at the curtain in the middle. The effect is bizarre.

It also feels just like a rough cut. When you edit a film, you assemble the takes you’re going to use, but always add half a second or about a dozen frames to what you want in the end, rather than spending time getting the exact frame to cut at. When you watch a rough cut it feels stilted, slow, with odd pauses between speakers. This film is like that all the way through. When you work on edits, you realize the skill of the film editor between rough cut and final cut. The final cut has pace and flow. I fear it’s deliberate … a rough cut would still be tighter than most of the cuts in this film, which is why it feels so ponderous and slow.

The dialogue is stilted, mainly because the script is stilted. The actors struggle to give it life, not helped by the pauses, but even an actor as good as Ben Whishaw or Lindsay Duncan can’t deal with convoluted stuff about an R-virus. You can’t deliver a text that’s nonsense meaningfully. I’ve spent so many hours of my life on audio production for ELT. I saw myself in the control room. I’d’ve asked for virtually every line to be re-done. I know they were meant to sound remote and stilted, but that should only be AFTER they get the virus, not before as well.

At one point, Alice has to say What? four times in a minute, with a couple of But … for good measure. I switched on subtitles and photographed the screen to obtain this transcript:

Psychotherapist: So your colleague …… Bella …… ?
Alice: Yeah. No. Well. She’s changed her mind recently. But … I think that’s because she’s been infected too.
Psychotherapist: Just like Joe.
Alice: Joe? It sounds so crazy. Ah. But. It’s as if … … … … Joe weren’t Joe anymore.
He frightens me.
Psychotherapist: Let’s remember Bella’s dog. In our last session you spoke about how Bella stopped loving her dog because she thought it had changed. She had it put down. Right?
Alice: Mmm … Hmm.
Psychotherapist: Is it possible Bella prompted certain fears in you. Fears connected with the loss of your son.

The pace is so measured. Lindsay Duncan tries so hard to breathe life into it. The camera tends to be on listener not speaker.

The accents don’t help. Ivan, Alice’s husband has an unexplained German accent. He’s not the only one with a vaguely German or Scandinavian accent, and maybe filming in Austria made it cheaper to employ local talent, or maybe Little Joe’s brain virus got their accents. Ric sounds odd. He looks odder.

Karl, played by the great Irish actor David Wilmot is full on Top o’ the morning to you, is the craic good? Irish, which also jars.

Nobody comes out well. Oddly for Ben Whishaw, who is normally brilliant (as in the play Mojo), though I have seen him act poorly (as in Peter And Alice).

The soundtrack is dominating. Perpetual painful electronic whining. Then piercing flute and bongos (welcome to psychedelia 67) … Go ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall.. Action is punctuated by sudden very loud percussive thumps.

Reviews are divided. It’s too slow for me. The script dialogue is very poor. Even the actors can’t make anything of it and the direction? It has that air of staccato clunkiness that reminded us of David Cronenberg’s 1975 Shivers in an odd way. Was it deliberate? Avant-garde or incompetent?

The latter for me.