The third film by British director Joanna Hogg, Exhibition brings viewers into the bespoke inner-London home of couple D (Viv Albertine, of punk legends The Slits) and H (conceptual artist Liam Gillick). Both career artists, working on separate floors, their relationship appears to be one of unintended emotional distance. Conversing via intercom and unable to synchronise their intimate impulses, they also grapple with the impending sale of their house – a habitat that D communes with as much as lives in.
Building a complex portrait from naturalistic, day-to-day snippets, Hogg peppers this behind-curtains peek with dryly humorous sketches of the irritations of modern middle class life – boring friends, wingtipped estate agents (including Hogg alum Tom Hiddleston), belligerent tradesmen – as well as moments of real empathy. One scene sees a tipsy H head out for a midnight walk into siren-filled streets, despite D’s anxious referral to a past incident. As he makes his tottering way through the darkened back lanes, she shadows him, shoeless, attached by an invisible tether.
Hogg’s creation of this inner-city microcosm is impressive, with window glass often acting as a refracting lens and sound design that amplifies the noise of London into a character itself; the clang of worksite scaffolding emphasized as much as any word uttered indoors. Within this setting, Albertine gives a quietly bold performance as a character who at first seems timid and uncertain, then slowly reveals something very different. She’s aided in this sleight-of-hand by Hogg’s steadfast realism, which only slips during a trip to London’s National Gallery for an artist talk by H, and perhaps again in the moving final shot of the house that closes the film.
Like a slow-moving iceberg, Exhibition’s glinting edges end up suggesting something much larger beneath the surface. In it’s understated way, it gently explores the deep meaning that homes have for people, the possibility of living at once together and apart, and how the inner (and erotic) life of an artist is sometimes only revealed through the work they make. Relationships, home and creativity are all familiar topics for film, but Exhibition feels as unique as each of them would be for anyone.
BY CHRIS HARMS
