Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Ventura Durall
Starring: Alex Brendemühl, Anna Alarcón, Verónica Echegui
The biggest, and most damaging, belief that fairy tales ever inculcated is
the ‘happily ever after’ myth. This catch all conclusion is a bogus
assurance because, even for those of us who may be blessed with long term
and loving relationships, the course ain’t going to run smooth forever: at
the very least it will involve unhappy compromise, hard-won forgiveness
and tough teamwork. I reckon the expectation of an impossible perfection
is what ends up condemning most relationships, this inability to accept
the bloom coming off the rose, the firm reality that the first flush of
love is by its very nature ephemeral. Nonetheless, popular culture
fetishizes these exciting, fleeting flashes in time via teen romances and
romcoms (not to mention the most misunderstood play of all time, Romeo and
Juliet, which isn’t about love at all, but a couple of daft kids who
simply got carried away), usually cutting the narrative at the first
tentative steps towards consummation - the climatic kiss. We never know
what happened to Danny and Sandy 10 years down the line, or, say, the
potential future of the kids from The Blue Lagoon (another
Randal Kleiser film!) if they hadn’t gone and eaten those bloody berries.
Ventura Durall’s (director, sharing script duties with
Sandra Beltrán, Clara Roquet and Guillem Sala)
The Offering offers a perverse mediation on the idealism of
doomed teen love, and the ensuing investments that we make in fairy tale
values. Jan (Alex Brendemühl, Hispanic Liev Schreiber) is in his
early forties. Having rescued fiery twentysomething cam girl Rita (Verónica Echegui, a Mediterranean Daisy Ridley) from a suicide attempt, the destitute kid
falls in love with him. It’s all a bit messy as Jan met the porn actress
delivering news of Rita’s own father’s death by suicide (oi, Rita, Electra
called: she wants her complex back). This opening vignette offers an early
indication of The Offering’s delicious cynicism about love and relationships, with its central
conviction that affiliations are always one sided, and that partners
unknowingly provide consolation for whatever psychological baggage weighs
down their counterpart.
Jan, you see, is still hung up on a relationship he had decades ago, with
young Violeta. To be fair, what arises in flashback is the sort of dreamy
fling which even the great Mr Kleiser would perhaps consider a bit on the
nose: a summer vacation romance, with the Adonis-like young Jan whisking
Violeta away from her annoying family and along the coast for swims in
secret bays, literal sex on the beach and the rebel excitement of young
love. Of course, summer lovin’ doesn’t last forever, and time and life
move on, and grown-up Violeta (Anna Alarcón, a Spanish Nicola
Walker) eventually marries nice-but-drab Nico, has a couple of kids, and
becomes a psychiatrist. But then, one fated morning, Rita walks into her
practice and makes claims about her husband being obsessed with another
woman: Violeta.
What follows is a contemporary take on Hitchcockian flavours of obsession
and cruelty, with Jan attempting, via deft manipulation of the damaged
Rita, to insinuate himself into Violeta’s life once again, and Violeta for
her part likewise tempted by the lingering memories of teenage lust.
Although The Offering is marketed as a sex thriller, within
the narrative Durrall counterpoints the erotic opportunities of youth with
the desperate seediness of middle age, and suggests how the harmless, and
natural, extra-curricular fantasies of the long term relationshipee
becomes utterly destructive when encouraged.
Like that other essayist of male obsession, Durrall’s camera has the dirty
old man energy of DePalma. The nudity is almost exclusively of the female
kind, and gratuitous enough (yes, even in an erotic thriller) to cause me,
one of the filthiest people alive, to balk a bit. Would it be too trite to
correspond the very blunt male gaze with the density of the character
writing, which is penned, in part, by two female screenwriters? As if the
film is borne of the very same tension which characterises its own
narrative? It is intriguing that the script gives us poignant and
insightful female psychology, broaching the idea that Violeta’s secure and
uneventful life is no excuse for her illicit cravings, and that longing
for the past at the exclusion of the present is sociopathic. Rita (and the
superlative performance of Echegui) is conducive to these ideas: a clever,
beautiful pornographer who is well aware of people’s weaknesses and how to
exploit them. The camera often resorts to her incredible face during
dialogue scenes: a concatenation of guarded looks, sly understandings and
human pain. She is the only one to comprehend the bleak absurdity of
adults who still believe in the childish lie of love.
Spoiler: loses a star for the silly ending.
The Offering is in UK cinemas and
on on VOD from July 30th.
