The unique work of a pair of artists drives its appreciators insane.
Review by Benjamin Poole (@filmclubchs)
Directed by: Kyle Broom
Starring: Jesse Woodrow, Tamzin Brown, Chris Carlisle, Ana Corby, Amber Friendly
I’d love to have a glass of wine and a wander round the Tate with writer/director Kyle Broom: I’m sure he would be edifying company, as his characters’ considerations regarding artificial representation and its subjective interface with real life are informed and intriguing. However, while such musings are interesting as thoughtful and original criticism, they, regrettably, do not work as cinema.
It is difficult to know where to begin with Kyle Broom’s Tabloid Vivant. Even the film’s official descriptors seem at odds, with imdb claiming the film is about ‘obsession with fame’ (zzzz), while the screener details advertise ‘a feature film about paintings that come to life and kill people’ (more like it!). The actuality is somewhere in between (I think).
Appropriate to a movie set in the art world, Tabloid Vivant affects an abstract approach to storytelling, with plot lines serving to frame the film’s musings on art and interaction, rather than tell a story that has narrative coherence (again, I think).
The film focuses on ambitious artist Maximilien Klinkau (Jesse Woodrow) and art critic friend with benefits Sara (Tamzin Brown). The beauteous pair hit upon a new way of processing painted art, one that creates vivid, living pictures (the ‘tabloid vivant’ of the title) by ‘digitising’ analogue images. Problem is, the resulting art seems to send whoever looks at it a bit nutty, due to its ‘random, mutating form’. After being subjected to Tabloid Vivant, I can fully sympathise.
Appropriate to a movie set in the art world, Tabloid Vivant affects an abstract approach to storytelling, with plot lines serving to frame the film’s musings on art and interaction, rather than tell a story that has narrative coherence (again, I think).
The film focuses on ambitious artist Maximilien Klinkau (Jesse Woodrow) and art critic friend with benefits Sara (Tamzin Brown). The beauteous pair hit upon a new way of processing painted art, one that creates vivid, living pictures (the ‘tabloid vivant’ of the title) by ‘digitising’ analogue images. Problem is, the resulting art seems to send whoever looks at it a bit nutty, due to its ‘random, mutating form’. After being subjected to Tabloid Vivant, I can fully sympathise.
If Tabloid Vivant was featured in a gallery, then the label would certainly specify ‘mixed media’; Broom is no slouch in the visuals department, at least, using different tones and textures to create a vivid, off kilter world. The film starts with a quite astounding recreation of the Black Dahlia’s murder, a sequence that utilises monochrome, off beat sound, and weird direction to create a bravura opening, one that ends in genuinely unsettling violence. Make the most of it though, because the film then shifts to modern day, and to our hipsters mentioned above, and their talk talk talk concerning the essence of art and fame, etc.
Broom punctuates his exposition with such visual affectations as animated cutaways, and panning shots of the actual script, the camera following its typed dialogue and directions (‘the trio start walking’). Perhaps this use of cutesy reflexes is demonstrative of the emblematic, elastic nature of the characters' lives, a deliberation upon the symbiosis of creator and text, and how meaning is ultimately discerned by the observer, who must sift through both paradigms in order to find the truth within…
Broom punctuates his exposition with such visual affectations as animated cutaways, and panning shots of the actual script, the camera following its typed dialogue and directions (‘the trio start walking’). Perhaps this use of cutesy reflexes is demonstrative of the emblematic, elastic nature of the characters' lives, a deliberation upon the symbiosis of creator and text, and how meaning is ultimately discerned by the observer, who must sift through both paradigms in order to find the truth within…
Or maybe such visual flares are simply that, empty dazzles to distract from Tabloid Vivant’s cumbersome pace. Non-causal scenes upon other digressions eventually get us to the Picture of Dorian Gray esque denouement, but until then it’s pretty ponderous.
I’d love to have a glass of wine and a wander round the Tate with writer/director Kyle Broom: I’m sure he would be edifying company, as his characters’ considerations regarding artificial representation and its subjective interface with real life are informed and intriguing. However, while such musings are interesting as thoughtful and original criticism, they, regrettably, do not work as cinema. Furthermore, for all its playful attributes, when Tabloid Vivant needs to introduce conflict or a sense of narrative tension, it clumsily reverts to established forms and hoary signifiers of creepy scores and shadowy corridors, resulting in such sequences as Sara walking around a dark hotel with only the light of her phone to guide her - that cursed cliché of modern horror! - a scene which seems to go on for two hours and comes to nothing. Similarly, as Max gets loopy at the end we also never really understand why; we’re just positioned to expect artists to automatically go insane, presumably because they’re sensitive and driven souls, high on emulsion fumes (and they say nurses have it bad).
When the paint is dry and the canvas unveiled, the end result is a Narcissus film, one that is so smitten with its subject that it fails to keep any distance, and fatally falls into its own self-reflexive sheen. I’m not sure how seriously to take Tabloid Vivant because, like its publicity, the film itself seems unsure of its intent. As Sara herself pointedly states in a criticism that harbours ironic relevance, ‘This is interesting, but in a who-gives-a-fuck kind of way’.
