Colin Firth's "Trauma" a modern "Vertigo"
Jaime Jeske
August 14, 2004
A modern Vertigo, with a twist of Lynch
By Mark Monahan
British director Marc Evans is happy to acknowledge the influences
behind his new thriller, Trauma. Mark Monahan met him
"I hope you all enjoy our nasty little film." It was with these ominous
words that British writer-director Marc Evans introduced an early
screening of his ingenious 2002 shocker My Little Eye, to a packed West
End cinema, two years ago.
His hopes were gruesomely realised. Nasty it was, and enjoy it we did,
provided of course you take "enjoy" to mean "sat welded to the seat with
fear and wondered if we'd ever sleep again". In fact, even those who
found this Big Brother-esque slasher too much to take would, if pressed,
have conceded that it heralded Evans as one of the most exciting new
names in British cinema.
Evans is now back with a fresh box of strange thrills, Trauma. Entirely
British-funded, it stars Colin Firth as Ben, who awakes from a coma in a
London hospital to find that he has been in a car crash and that his
wife, Elisa (Naomie Harris) is dead.
It turns out that, while he is grieving in private, the rest of the
world is lamenting the recent murder of pop star Lauren Parris. The plot
thickens further when it emerges that Ben may in some way be linked to
Parris's death, his wife very much alive, and his grasp on reality
fragile at best - and, when new neighbour Charlotte (a luminous Mena
Suvari) appears, we soon wonder if she is even real.
Although similar in intensity to My Little Eye, Trauma is nevertheless a
very different animal. "My Little Eye was about looking very brutally
through an objective camera, at these five people," says Evans, when we
meet in London, "almost as if they were lab rats.
"But the stylistically interesting thing about Trauma was that we're
looking at it all from the point of view of this poor main character,
who's in every scene. So it seemed a chance to make a subjective film -
what was it like to be this man, this sort of troubled character?"
In some ways, Trauma comes across as a very modern Vertigo. Ben is in a
grim state, but this is after all Colin Firth - Mr Darcy! Much like
James Stewart in Hitchcock's masterpiece, we are at once reluctant to
believe that he has anything other than sanity and rectitude at his
core, while also harbouring the faint worry that he might be about to
plunge headlong into the abyss. Is this what Evans had in mind?
"Absolutely," says the garrulous, charming 45-year-old, his accent
betraying his south-Wales origins. "I'd long thought, whatever happened
to those man-in-a-suit films? Trauma's not quite that - it's a
man-in-a-hooded-top film, really - but it's a basically Hitchcockian
film of the man that you rely upon, on whose side you 'know' you're
going to be.
"I thought that Colin post-Darcy could bring all that with him, in a
Henry Fonda kind of way. But you start to question him as you do with
Fonda in Vertigo: is he a reliable narrator?"
As his fleeting muddle over Fonda/Stewart suggests, Evans has an
engaging conversational knack for getting names wrong. As a director,
however, he could not be more meticulous. Like My Little Eye, Trauma has
an evenness of tone and an absolute refusal to let the audience relax
that will not be to everyone's taste, but which are expertly achieved.
The film is an extraordinary collage of bleak London cityscapes and
neurotic, intimate close-ups - brilliantly shot by John Mathieson,
Ridley Scott's cinematographer of choice, and beautifully scored by
Touching the Void's Alex Heffes. It feels the work of a man who admires
not just Hitchcock, but David Lynch too.
"Well," says Evans, "that's the biggest compliment you can pay me! When
I think of David Lynch, I also think of his lineage, and part of that is
Surrealism. And whenever I start making a film, there are pictures I
stick on the wall, and the one I chose for this was by [Italian
Surrealist] De Chirico.
"He does something with these railway bridges and colonnades that scares
the shit out of you, and I was trying to think, how does he do that? And
what is scary about the guy in Lynch's Eraserhead walking under the
concrete bridge?
"There's something about bridges, and lone objects in gutters - it comes
out of, if you like, the Surrealist handbook, of which Lynch is the
greatest living exponent. It's just the stuff I like, the stuff of
nightmares, and I aspired to work that into the film."
Evans's evident passion for art stems directly from his childhood
ambition. "I just wanted to paint," he says. Born in 1959, he grew up in
Cardiff, and went to a tough but academically ambitious Welsh-speaking
school. His interest in art history morphed into reading "straight"
history and history of art at Cambridge, thereby taking him ever further
from directly artistic pursuits, but, inspired by a friend, he did a
postgrad, practical course in filmmaking at Bristol.
"I didn't have this massive knowledge of European cinema," he says, "or
the Nouvelle Vague, or anything, I wasn't aware of the whole canon, so
it's been a bit like Educating Rita ever since."
After Bristol, he cut his teeth on television dramas, and worked up to
My Little Eye with the features House of America (1997), Resurrection
Man (1998) and Beautiful Mistake (2000). Trauma hits British screens
later this month, and Evans is now in early talks over a new project,
Snow Cake, a far gentler road-movie drama to star Alan Rickman and
(hopefully) Sigourney Weaver.
"It'll be the first film I've made where someone doesn't die at the end
and someone else walks away!" says Evans. "Snow Cake is just wonderful -
I almost feel like I'm on a mission about it. If we can't make it, then
the British film industry is so deeply fucked, that I really think
you've got to think about what you're going to spend the rest of your
life doing."
Despite his misgivings about UK cinema ("The biggest frustration is that
we don't get to work more often"), Evans has no intention of moving from
London, where he lives with Nia, his partner of three years.
"The only place you'd move to would be America, and that'd be too big
and too scary to navigate - to commit your life to it and navigate that
corporate world. I sort of feel that this is where I want to work, this
is my home, and this is where I should be able to get things made."
Trauma opens on August 27.
Copyright 2004 "The Telegraph."
Jaime