Former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine stars in this portrait of an upper-echelon creative-class London couple who, after spending 20 years in the same house, are forced to upend their routine lives and sell out. Director Joanna Hogg's Exhibition is an interesting experiment in minimalism, even down to the characters' names: Albertine plays “D,” a hypersensitive introvert who is also paradoxically a successful avant-garde performance artist, while her husband,” H” (Liam Gillick), is a nebbish writer of some distinction. Both spend almost all of their time at home in what can only be called a bizarre semi-somnambulant state, speaking to one another via intercom and only seeming to physically connect at night in bed, where their sexual communication is just as weird and somewhat dysfunctional as their verbal communication. Serving up a measured deliberation on the alienated relationship between city dwellers and the quickly changing urban spaces in which they live, Exhibition bravely forgoes any sort of musical soundtrack, instead emphasizing the buzzes, bangs, hums, clangs, rattles, and siren wails that add to (or perhaps mirror) the dissonance in the quietly warped lives of these slightly off-kilter characters. Recommended. (M. Sandlin)
Exhibition
Kino Lorber, 104 min., not rated, DVD: $29.95, Nov. 4 Volume 30, Issue 1
Exhibition
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