{"id":2301,"date":"2012-12-15T14:34:15","date_gmt":"2012-12-15T13:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2301"},"modified":"2016-01-24T18:45:56","modified_gmt":"2016-01-24T17:45:56","slug":"i-anna-dir-barnaby-southcombe-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2301","title":{"rendered":"I, Anna<\/em> (2012), dir. Barnaby Southcombe"},"content":{"rendered":"

I, Anna<\/em> is Barnaby Southcombe’s feature film debut and there are many ways in which it actually seems like a slightly more stuffed episode of a TV series.\u00a0 Charlotte Rampling, Southcombe’s real life mother, plays Anna Welles, a salesperson at a London Peter Jones store.\u00a0 Anna, a lonely divorcee, lives in a one-bedroom flat with her daughter, Emmy, and her grand-daughter.\u00a0 Rampling plays Anna as someone both continually hesitant and yet sexually complicit, and this latter creates the plot that moves the film into what the publicists call ‘noir-ish’.\u00a0 The other main figure is D.C.I Bernie Reid, played in equally downbeat and hesitant fashion by Gabriel Byrne.\u00a0 After a body is discovered and Anna is seen coming out of the building where it is found, Reid becomes obsessed with her.\u00a0 And eventually, they meet at one of the singles evenings that Anna has taken to attending.<\/p>\n

Southcombe has an eye for the bedsit highrise world of London. And he gives the high rise estates around the Barbican a kind of poetry.\u00a0 However, the anomie and loneliness that world breeds dominate the first half of the film in a way which allows no-one to breath. His camera closes in on the faces of the two main protagonists in a way which allows them little leeway.\u00a0 And yet both Rampling and Byrne are superb at showing the suppressed desperation that this world induces.<\/p>\n

And the plot of the film seems messy.\u00a0 There is a sub-plot attached to the murder;\u00a0 a sub-plot which never feels satisfactorily developed.\u00a0 And as Anna’s life unravels, Southcombe brings in time-distortions which, in another’s hands, would have been strong and beguiling but here seem muddled.<\/p>\n

All of that is a pity because it is a film that the viewer urges to rise above its limitations, just because Rampling and Byrne are often wonderful.
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Ian Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[14,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nI, Anna (2012), dir. Barnaby Southcombe - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=2301\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I, Anna (2012), dir. 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