TRANCE – The Review

While it’s as technically impressive as you’d expect from eclectic director Danny Boyle, TRANCE is not the masterful entertainment you might have hoped for considering the talent involved. It’s a crime film, a caper story that start off a suitably thrilling ride but steers into a vast pile-up of pop psychology and B-movie tropes that knock the viewer right off-balance – never to recover.

TRANCE begins as a classic caper. Franck (Vincent Cassel), a sinister tough with a trio of equally sinister goons, plans to lift a valuable Francisco Goya painting by in broad daylight from a London auction house. His inside accomplice is Simon (James McAvoy), a young art security expert mired in gambling debt. But the job doesn’t go as planned and Simon sustains a blow to the head. Franck and his gang get away but Simon awakens from his coma to find he can’t remember where he hid the painting. Since yanking out Simon’s fingernails doesn’t help, Franck hires hypnotherapist Dr. Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson) to recover memories from Simon’s subconscious while he is in a hypnotic trance. Instead of breaking into a bank, these thieves are going to break into someone’s mind! But once Dr Lamb realizes what the stakes are, she demands a piece of the real action. Double-cross, murder, and confusion ensue.

I enjoyed the set up and opening scenes of TRANCE. Simon’s descriptions of his job are fun and cinematic, and Boyle draws the viewer into the story quickly. But it soon becomes apparent that in Simon we have an unreliable narrator and TRANCE becomes busy with flashbacks, hallucinations and Freudian analysis that are all so mixed up that the plot descends into a big muddy puddle of narrative. As such, we’re never close to being emotionally-invested or sympathetic to Simon’s plight regardless of how tight the walls are closing in. With paranoia everywhere, it’s clear Boyle’s influences include Fifties noir, Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND, and the Chris Nolan puzzlebox mindbenders MOMENTO and INCEPTION. TRANCE has been made with skill and care — Boyle lovingly considers even the smallest details — and there are few pretensions here. Yet what ultimately sticks in the mind is how hard the movie works for so little effect. For all the trickiness and bluster, TRANCE lacks spark.

Almost from the start, Boyle uses cinematic trickery and a driving rock score to keep things off-kilter. However, off-kilter is slowly revealed as the only speed offered here, with information dribbling out in a couple of awkwardly blunt exposition scenes. Mcavoy, confidently anchoring it all, veers between tough and rattled. Though his performance is designed to be mysterious, he often simply mouths questions and waits for some B-movie tradition (the loathsome villain, the mystery woman) to provide answers. No one can play the menacing Frenchman as gleefully as Vincent Cassel. With his sneer alone, Cassel swipes every scene he’s in and the film drags during the stretches that lack his twinkling maliciousness. Ms Dawson, a dark ethnic beauty in the traditionally blonde femme fatale role, is handed a tricky part. She alternates between cool and sultry, hot and clinical, and bares it all in a couple of full-frontal nude scenes (and I tell you what – she’s got a fine figure that gal!). TRANCE has striking sound design and startlingly colorful cinematography, all askew camera angles and fractured reflections, by Anthony Dod Mantle who won the Oscar winner for SLUMDOG. TRANCE is a well-made psychological crime film but you have to slog through an awful lot of loony-bin psychobabble to get much out of it.

3 of 5 Stars

Read the WAMG Interview with TRANCE director Danny Boyle HERE

http://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2013/04/wamg-interview-danny-boyle-director-of-trance/

Trance opens Friday, April 12th in St. Louis at (among other places) Landmark’s Tivoli Theater and Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Theater