Directrospective: TRANCE (2013)

Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.

Boyle’s 2013 post-Olympics goof is full of reflective surfaces, because, like, things aren’t always what they seem or whatever.

In Spike Jonze’s 2002 metafictional masterpiece ADAPTATION, Charlie Kaufman’s much dumber fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman, humiliates Charlie by selling an extremely stupid screenplay called THE 3. It follows a cop as he tracks down a serial killer who has chained the cop’s girlfriend up in a basement, and at the end it’s revealed that the cop, the killer, and the girlfriend have all been one person with a split personality disorder. It’s a funny idea, just on the far side of believable as a real thriller a studio might buy at the time, and of course very stupid. It requires that a single person on a motorcycle chases himself on a horse on which he has also kidnapped himslf, and that a police officer has been reporting to work while also being imprisoned underground. When pressed as to how the same person could be in three places at once, Donald replies, “trick photography.” As Charlie points out, it’s the kind of thing that only makes sense as a shocking reveal at the end of a screenplay, not the satisfying and inevitable conclusion of a story.

I think Donald Kaufman may have done some uncredited work on TRANCE.

Shot in 2011 and completed after Danny Boyle was finished directing the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, TRANCE had been in the works for quite a long time. Screenwriter Joe Ahearne sent his spec hypnosis art heist screenplay to the director of the then-new film SHALLOW GRAVE in 1994, and while Boyle apparently liked it, he made TRAINSPOTTING instead and then got pretty busy. Ahearne’s script was first produced as a TV movie in 2001 to relatively little response. Boyle evidently couldn’t get the story out of his head and two decades later contacted Ahearne, at that point a working television writer and director, to finally take a crack at it. His old pal John Hodge, out of the Boyle sphere since 2000’s THE BEACH (save for an unreleased 2008 short film, ALIEN LOVE TRIANGLE, which I haven’t been able to track down), came on to rewrite the script with Ahearne, and they share screenplay credit.

Here’s the plot as it appears to play out: fine art auctioneer Simon Newton (James McAvoy doing a decent Ewan McGregor) gets involved in the theft of a Goya from the London gallery where he works. He attempts to subdue the thief, Franck (Vincent Cassel), and gets knocked out. When the smoke clears, Franck realizes Simon has cut the painting out of its frame and hidden it somewhere. Turns out Simon was supposed to be in on the heist but got carried away improvising some hero behavior, and now he’s gummed up the works. Torturing him won’t help because the whack on the head has left Simon with no memory of where he put the damn thing. Franck decides to hire a hypnotherapist to help Simon remember, and Simon picks one from the internet whose photo he likes.

The friendly-faced hypnotherapist from the internet is an American named Elizabeth Lamb (friendly-faced American Rosario Dawson). Something about Simon gives her pause when they first meet, but she takes him on. Very quickly she’s on to the thieves listening in on the session from a van outside, but instead of calling the police, she insists they cut her in on the sale of the painting once it’s been found. Then things get really complicated, with Elizabeth becoming sexually involved with both men, and reveal after reveal upends what we thought was going on and stretches our suspended disbelief well past its breaking point.

It turns out that Simon was Elizabeth’s client before all of this, looking for her help with his gambling addiction. They began a romantic relationship which became abusive, so she used her hypnosis powers to make him forget about her. This also brought the addiction back, and the art theft scheme was part of a deal Simon struck with Franck to resolve his debts. So Elizabeth has terrible professional ethics, but I guess she’s the protagonist now that the guy we’re supposed to have been rooting for has been revealed to be an abusive monster. We’re supposed to feel bad about her falling back under Simon’s abusive spell rather than icky about the whole unpleasant business. There’s a bunch of scuffling between the mentally shattered Simon and Franck and his goons, and eventually a fiery car crash into the river from which Franck escapes and Simon does not. From there, it turns out that the whole bit about her and Simon falling in love was real, but when she hypnotized her abuser into forgetting her she also hypnotized him back into degenerate gambling and orchestrated his betrayal during the art heist so that she could get the painting for herself. She tells all of this to Franck via special-delivery iPad, which charms him because game recognize game, and invites him to come find her if he wants to have a really fucked-up life together.

Amnesia, a high-concept heist, a profoundly generous understanding of hypnosis, a web of double-crossings based on superhuman forethought - it’s no wonder this script is from 1994. This is the kind of post-Tarantino dreck that weighed down video store shelves for a decade, of which impressed-with-itself mindfuck horseshit like THE USUAL SUSPECTS is probably the highest artistic achievement. These movies can’t help but ooze satisfaction with themselves for having pulled the rug out from under the audience, even if that’s very easy to do when you’ve been playing fast and loose with things like logic. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m one of those plot hole detective guys; a story doesn’t need to be airtight to have emotional or thematic resonance. But films like this and THE USUAL SUSPECTS and Donald Kaufman’s THE 3 are self-conscious exercises in plot construction that don’t have much substance beyond their serpentine structures, and if they can’t hold water they don’t have anything else to offer. Thankfully, most of the film industry has left this sort of thing behind.

Ahearne’s rewrite with John Hodge jazzes up the old plot with some computer business for the 2010s, and notably leaves the film with an unpleasant blend of the gender politics of 1994 and 2013. McAvoy’s Simon is the ostensible main character, and the one with the most dramatic “arc,” but Boyle has described TRANCE as his first film with a woman at the center. Dawson’s character plays the men’s sexual and romantic interest in her to her own advantage in a way that feels resourceful 2013 three-dimensional woman, not devious 1994 seductress. Elizabeth’s abuse by Simon is frightening, and the film flirts with the difficulty of getting out of an abusive dynamic. But the revelation of her master plan casts doubt on almost everything we’ve seen. Is the film suggesting that she played up her fear of Simon to win Franck’s sympathy or convince him he needed to rescue her? If she can exert this much unconscious control over the people around her, is she not an abuser herself? These are irresponsible implications for the film to make. Beyond that, Boyle takes several opportunities to sexualize Dawson in ways that I think are intended to strike a balance between confidence and vulnerability. What he does strike is me as cowardly, with a ton of female frontal nudity and at least two blatantly squandered opportunities for McAvoy and Cassel to up his career dong count. It’s bullshit.

More than anything, TRANCE feels like Boyle trying to give us one more taste of the grimy, trippy British crime thrillers that kick-started his career. While Anthony Dod Mantle does his best to bathe everything in neon colors and fractured reflections that point back to the rave aesthetics of SHALLOW GRAVE or TRAINSPOTTING, helped along by Rick Smith’s Madchester-adjacent thump music, there’s a slickness and a misanthropic bitterness to TRANCE that those early films didn’t have. It’s a nasty little movie, and not in a good way.