A handsome modernist London townhouse has the power and presence of a third character in this closely observed dramatic portrait of its owners, an artist couple on the brink of change.
Exhibition reaffirms Joanna Hogg’s status as a distinctive, singular and challenging voice of British cinema.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2014
Exhibition 2013
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.
“This is confident, uncompromising work, with a ghostliness that plays on your mind for days, and it cements Hogg’s place at the forefront of new British cinema.” — Robbie Collin, The Telegraph