Blood
Directed by: Jerry Ciccoritti
Adapted by: Jerry Ciccoritti from a play by Tom Walmsley
Starring: Emily Hampshire, Jacob Tierney

Rating:  

Reviewed by Hal Gray

Ho, Ho, Ho, Merry Christmas

Why release a movie at the time of Peace and Love that intimates drug use, incest, calumny, baseness and hate? (I say ‘intimates' because there's a lot of talking and no carrying through.) Perhaps the same amount of trenchant thinking that went into the creative idea went into the marketing plan, as well.

The story: An addict—penniless and needing a fix—wants her brother ‘to fuck' her in front of a trick for five hundred dollars. He's not too keen on the idea, but vixen that she is, with a golden tongue to boot, he sticks around while they talk about it—interminably. (Jackie Burroughs, where are you when we need you?)

Blood, an adaptation of a play by Tom Walmsley, looks like, well, a play with one set, despite Director Jerry Ciccoritti's attempt to disguise the fact with constant split screens, transpositions and shots of the Decarie Expressway to help move things along. (The film was shot in Montreal.) Just conjecture here on my part, but I'm thinking the play must have run in a small venue and received some sort of status amongst hard-core performers; enough so, to encourage Ciccoritti to make a movie out of it.

Although Oh, Calcutta broke some big taboos back in the late ‘60s, live theatre still has the power to raise the hair on one's neck when actors take their clothes off and say and do naughty, even outlandish, things to one another. These actions will even cloud over the mind and obscure a poor play until you get out of the theatre into the cool air. But in film, once the celluloid barrier turns on, we're removed at least one step from those immediate intimacies that shock us by our mere presence.

Blood fails as a movie in much the same way the recent Closer (also an adaption) does, except in a much more unsophisticated but grander way. I still don't know what the filmmaker is trying to say. If it's about depravity and either personal redemption, or being a Canadian film, failure, we don't see any of it. We hear a lot about it, however. No one shoots or snorts drugs. No one has illicit or lubricious sex. Arguably society's greatest taboo—incest—is not consummated, and in fact, is used as a plot point every once in a while to drive the action. Are they going to do it? Are they not? Blah, blah, blah. Even a nasty, threatening character the brother and sister have issues with, who they talk about at length every ten minutes or so, doesn't make an appearance. All the bogey men are off screen.

Why these two people are in the situation they're in might be interesting. But they don't tell us the ‘why'. What they think and feel about the situation they're in might capture our imagination. But they don't seem capable of leaving the salacious details alone or being above a shallow analysis of their motivations. The fact that the brother is an Anglican novitiate and we see several shots of a beaded cross wrapped around his wrist must mean something. A ‘statement' about organized religion maybe? Or another sort handcuff no different than the ones in the sister's bag of sexual tools. The director leaves no clues. All along the sound track has someone singing a spooky ‘Love is weird'. I didn't see any evidence of love, weird or not.

Emily Hampshire as the duplicitous, amoral drug-driven sister carves out a strong performance, but after a time has nowhere to take the character to new levels. Jacob Tierney, as the weak, equally amoral brother, is suited for the part. His character has the most potential to examine its, and possibly our, hypocrisies. I would demure as to these performances being ‘courageous' as has been bandied about. The Brits—closest to our acting tradition—cut their teeth on this kind of stuff. That's what they do. They're actors.