Heartless

The problem (and, usually, the strength) with a film like Heartless, Philip Ridley’s first film in nearly two decades, is in the subtlety of the shadow-play—the metaphorical imagery and its alien origins. Where some films personify the outsiders view on a protagonist’s altered state of mind, Heartless renders its afflicted character’s perceived reality as its own reality. A similar conceit arose with The Reflective Skin, but where some weird form of infantile psychosis, basically childhood itself, was there like a slow brilliant burn veneering the film’s surface, Heartless’ essential schizophrenic point of view, Jamie, disinforms with such consistency the truth framing the film’s illustrated demonic reality gets quite nearly lost in the convolution.  Heartless, as a plot driven picture, lacks a certain distilled fictional device (a representation of the narrator as he truly is within one concise and self-contained scene, some kind of key to learning how to frame the film’s occurrences a little more surely) to lead its audience into the world it has superimposed on the everyday. There are demons running the film’s London streets and whether they are demons or fucked up little chavs (which they are) it does not matter—everyone I know from London gets mugged at least once a year, most of them have been threatened to death on at least one occasion; the chav-demons are, quite truly, both, whether they have the faces to prove it or not, and while I can concede this and appreciate the strength of such an idea, the delivery here is, sometimes, difficult. Whether this is a good or bad thing I do not know. I can imagine how Ridley might propound the idea that to show London’s underbelly as it truly is—heartless—one must first use the right eyes, which will see it as it truly is, wholly. Jamie is paranoia-heightened, most probably schizoid and has those eyes: he is responsible for the devil with whom he makes a deal to kill, the consequential disappearance of his heart-shaped birthmark, the demons pursuing him and the preternatural Indian girl who follows him around, calls him “daddy,” whom no one but himself and the devil can see and whom fulfills his desire for a daughter. His state is evidence of deliberateness in the reality’s receiver, which cements my understanding of Ridley’s reasoning. But then, though the film supports the reading described above better than any other, it also allows the viewer to think of it as a lucid and hallucination-free depiction of the veritable devil and his henchmen. Whether this is actually a problem, I cannot say; as a reading, however, it bores me to death. Something should have been done to better deter the possibility of such a reading; to keep it from becoming a possible primary, rather than merely an alternative, interpretation. 20 years later, I am not interested in Philip Ridley, the man who gave us The Reflective Skin, coming up with a film some will construe as bonafide horror, rather than as a metaphorical “hell on earth” work of, essentially, realism; as something like From Hell, rather than something between Spider and Harry Brown. Whether most viewers will get what I got from it, it is hard to say; but I am sure more than enough will think of it as a horror, period, to ruin the effort altogether.