Steve Buscemi is Pierre, a bitter hack sent to interview Sienna Miller’s vacuous starlet, Katya. Over the course of the night, they torment, abuse, confide in and flirt with each other in this shifty psychological drama.
Based on a film by murdered Dutch director Theo van Gogh, Interview has an experimental vibe. Shot on ugly DV and set largely in Katya’s Manhattan loft, it’s talky, theatrical and frequently frustrating. Both Pierre and Katya are hideous creations – him wheedling and lecherous, her desperate and needy. They circle each other like dancers, or maybe vultures, constantly caught between dependence and revulsion.
Its themes are timely, however. We live in an age of media hype and saturation, where an abducted child is just another soap opera, and self-appointed celebrities gaze out from the pages of newspapers. In Pierre and Katya both entertainment and journalism reach their twin nadirs; both professions fuelled by mutual antagonism, but each assured of its own destruction if it rejects the other.
What Interview fails to do, however, is go the extra step and place the blame at its proper door. After all, both entertainment and journalism are service industries, and neither is quite so disgustingly hypocritical as their punters – milquetoast liberals and middle-class voyeurs who tut-tut into their Guardian while forking out for the latest Heat, bemoaning ‘celebrity culture’ while refusing to acknowledge their own seedy complicity.
And that’s the point, isn’t it? Whatever its qualities as a film, Interview’s meta-textual relevance will grab the headlines. The same emasculated hacks it so baldly vilifies will obsess over Sienna Miller’s premiere outfit while ignoring the damning critique she represents. But don’t be fooled into thinking Miller is as one-dimensional as those who judge her. She’s a charismatic screen presence, and even as she struggles to find a persona that really defines her as an actress, she takes roles like this one, exactly the kind that Katya wouldn’t dream of playing.
That said, the film still suffers for its implausibility, and the interview itself is a fantasy scenario. Indeed, for a film with so muck yak, yak, yakking, remarkably little is ever actually said.
