This is not the first literary work in which paralysis is the mystery at its heart. In Arthur Miller’s play Broken Glass, which is being revived at The Young Vic next year, the condition befalls a Jewish woman in Brooklyn in 1938. She has been unable to walk ever since reading reports about Kristallnacht.
In Deborah Levy’s 2016 Booker-nominated novel – which has been delicately adapted for the screen by writer/director Rebecca Lenkiewicz – an altogether different trauma is at play. Though it too may be psychological.Rose (Fiona Shaw) and her 25-year-old daughter Sofia (Emma Mackey) have travelled to a hot, barren coastal town in Spain where Rose hopes to be cured of the ailment that has prevented her from walking for over two decades. Here Dr Gomez (a sympathetic yet sceptical Vincent Perez), to whom Rose has paid £25,000, clearly suspects that the cause of Rose’s condition is not physiological. Does Sofia?
The key to Mackey’s immensely watchable performance is in conveying the stoicism and interiority of a character who in Levy’s book is the narrator. Crucially it also conveys Sofia’s (unspoken) opinion that she agrees with Gomez’s scepticism. This is not what Rose paid for. To the mother’s surprise and disappointment the doctor is attempting a talking cure rather than a pharmaceutical one. Meanwhile Sofia is tethered to her mother and that wheelchair just as she was in the UK. The daughter has learned to expand her life within stolen moments away from her mother’s needs and that biting criticism. Swimming in the sea among jellyfish and the pain of their stings becomes a kind of anaesthetic to being a carer on demand. So is the affair with with Inge (Vicky Krieps) who, it turns out, has her own trauma.
In Lenkiewicz’s directorial debut the circumstances of her characters are established with care and admirable economy. Yet the movie is not the observational study it aims to be. Editing often jump-cuts us to the heart of a scene rather than allowing it to develop. Other than when Sofia passes locals practising Flamenco, the camera is oddly incurious about the place in which Rose and Sofia find themselves.
The performances are excellent, as you would expect from a cast this strong, even if Patsy Ferran as the doctor’s daughter is somewhat wasted. Shaw’s Rose however is both likeable and infuriatingly self-centred in the way that only someone used to their own drama being centre stage can be. It is reasonable therefore to ask how much of this Sofia can take. A shame though that the answer arrives as an unconvincing cliffhanger
Certificate: 15
