Exhibition – Wellington Film Society

Joanna Hogg, UK 2013, 106 minutes M Sex scenes, offensive language

Exhibition is a portrait of a fictional marriage framed within the glass walls of a notable modernist townhouse in London. Designed by the architect James Melvin, to whom the film is dedicated, it plays the home, of 20 years’ standing, to an artist couple who also maintain separate workplaces there. For reasons we are left to guess, they’ve placed the house on the market. He’s leaving willingly, ‘before it’s too late’, he says. She’s reluctant. We observe them, wary and adrift in a limbo of imminent detachment from their familiar habitat. The actors, Viv Albertine – former guitarist from The Slits – and the conceptual artist Liam Gillick, bring a canny naturalism to the portrayal of two deeply self-conscious urbanites. Admirers of director Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated will recognise her precise, well-informed calibration of their discomfort. Architectural space and personal relationship have rarely been so inextricably related in a film.
- Bill Gosden, NZIFF 2014.