Archipelago

Archipelago is an elusive, elegiac second feature from Joanna Hogg, one of the most exciting new directors in British cinema. Like her startling 2008 debut Unrelated, Archipelago refracts the solitude and ennui of human existence through the prism of an upper-middle class English family holiday: Noel Coward meets Michael Haneke. Before heading off to Africa, Edward (a maturer, more subdued Tom Hiddleston than the one we saw in Unrelated) joins his mother Patricia (Kate Fahy) and sister Cynthia (Lydia Lloyd) in a remote house they have rented on the Scilly Isles for a holiday of long walks, painting lessons and sitting around while meals are cooked for them. Bliss, you might think, but far from it! It becomes a genteel nightmare, in which Hogg tempers the lyricism of the Tresco landscape with naturalistic, Rohmerian dialogue and a darker feel for stasis, claustrophobia and silence.

A former photographer and apprentice to Derek Jarman, Joanna Hogg composes the architecture of each frame like a European master, such as Theo Angelopoulos or Victor Erice. The camera doesn't move, but she packs each shot with nuance and painterly juxtapositions (look out for the background reactions of Rose the cook). The narrative focus of the film is rather more obscure, and richer for it: like the superb scene in Unrelated where the row between Oakley and his father is shown from the perspective of the reluctant listeners, the mother's worst argument with her husband (whom we never see) occurs off-screen. Indeed, the film consists of the very scenes less brave directors would omit (group silences, filler conversations, awkward meals), the feathers and innards of the plot rather than the meat, but Hogg arranges them so intuitively and so precisely that the film becomes as much about what we don't see or hear as what we do. Why is the sister so unhappy? What did Rose's letter say? Is there more to art teacher Christopher than meets the eye?

The cast, a mix of professionals and non-actors, is excellent. One scene, a conversation between Edward (RADA-educated, Olivier Award-winning Hiddleston) and Christopher (played by Hogg’s former art teacher Christopher Banks) about the “intensity of conviction” needed to succeed as an artist, is a particularly effective mix of technique and unstudied spontaneity. Hiddleston will be a household name before too long (Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor are all on the horizon), but I do hope he keeps working with Hogg: they could be the Scorsese and De Niro of British arthouse.

Archipelago is a beguiling piece from a genuine auteur. It presents human nature as nature: beautiful, indifferent, solitary and fickle. The film is bleak, elliptical and exquisitely shot, but also very sweet and very funny (there is a lovely moment with a toy badger). It is less potent, raw and immediately moving than Unrelated, but is subtler, more ambitious and visually even richer. Of this current Golden Age of female British directors (Andrea Arnold, Clio Barnard, Lucy Walker and Sophie Fiennes amongst many others), Joanna Hogg is the Terrence Malick, the understated maverick and perhaps the most intriguing of the lot.