Archipelago* Review

Hogg is inviting us to dismiss these people as fundamentally different to ourselves. But sat in a dark auditorium, we are merely laughing at each other.

When Unrelated took 2007’s London Film Festival by storm, critics compared debut director Joanna Hogg’s austere artistry to Eric Rohmer. But for all its confidence of form, what was most striking about Unrelated was that it seemed to be a figment from some hidden recess of experience.

Archipelago, Hogg’s second film, is equally personal. Set on the scattered Isles of Scilly, we meet three-quarters of an affluent British family: Edward (Tom Hiddleston), an untethered 28-year-old who is shortly to leave England for an 11-month voluntary placement in Africa; his mother Patricia (Kate Fahy), an implacably elegant yet drawn woman; and his sister Cynthia (Lydia Leonard), a quick-witted girl frustrated with her mother’s reticence and in possession of an acid tongue. Into this mix is thrown Rose (Amy Lloyd), a cook and maid with the hint of a regional accent.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of a continent, and this film examines in quietly domesticated scenes the expanse that exists between each member of this family, but also the ties that bind them.

As the family picnic, paint and reminisce, the absence of Edward’s father becomes insistently conspicuous. They are all waiting for his arrival, yet noone has the courage to say it. Occasionally they enjoy themselves. Often, they merely feign it. Inexorably, a potent tension builds.

Hogg, the product of affluent Middle England, is highly-literate in the unsaid decrees and subtle gradations of manners. She communicates these inhibitions with the observational faculties you’d expect of the arthouse, like a Leigh for posh people fused with a gentle Michael Haneke.

Watching Archipelago unfurl, one gains the all too rare assurance that the director is in complete control. Hogg chose to shoot the film in script order, keeping the ensemble cast in the holiday house for the duration. Some scenes seem half-caught and inconsequential – a puff on a cigarette and a pensive glance, some aborted small talk – like a careless smudge on a large canvass. Others are long and open – in one scene, the family arrives at an empty restaurant and spends an eternity deciding which, of the sea of empty tables, should be theirs.

In the hands of a less sensitive director this film could feel small and thin, but Hogg, who holidayed here as a child, brings the Isles of Scilly into the centre of the tale. The inhibitions that hang so heavily on the family in the clean, pastel confines of the house fleetingly vanish when they journey into the inky mash of colours on this far-flung wing of Britain.

Unrelated was an accomplished work by any standards, but Archipelago is calmer, even more careful and attentive and conscious of overstaying its welcome. Yet a bite remains; an acute, intimate and searching frustration.

And so something quiet, reticent but defiantly challenging grows. Again and again, in scenes full of humour and strain, Hogg is tempting us to laugh accusingly at Edward’s callow engagement with the job of life, at his sister’s narrow expression through angular snipes, at his mother’s servitude to unspoken etiquette.

Hogg is inviting us to dismiss these people as fundamentally different to ourselves. But sat in a dark auditorium, we are merely laughing at each other.