Sunday Review: Trance

Tell me how it ends

By Morris Dean

I don't know how Trance ends. This slick, over-self-confident mistake of a film (2013, directed by Danny Boyle and starring James McAvoy, Vincent Cassel, and Rosario Dawson) dissolved into incoherence minutes before I checked with my wife and we agreed it was hopeless. It started out with the heist of a twenty-or-so-million-dollar Goya painting, which the insider Simon (McAvoy) "lost" and couldn't remember where he'd put it because of being hit in the head by fellow art thief Franck (Cassel) during the robbery, leading to their engaging hypnotherapist Elizabeth (Dawson)....It wasn't long into the "therapy" that the plot melted all over the screen like...what? Scrambled eggs being heated on a cold grill?
    We would have ejected the DVD sooner but we had both been assuming the other must be enjoying the film—or at least still feeling hopeful.
    Wrong!

    I don't know what the last thing was that my wife had enjoyed, but, truthfully, the only thing I'd enjoyed for fifteen minutes was the full frontal nude shot of Rosario Dawson coming out of the bathroom toward James McaAvoy, where she has just shaved her pudenda. (My wife suggested she had probably had "a Brazilian.")
    Next morning my wife said, "I guess James McAvoy must have signed on because he thought the script was interesting."
    "Or," I suggested, "he wanted to do that sex scene with Rosario Dawson?"
    "But they were only acting," she said.
    "I'm not so sure," I said. "I don't see how a man could act that with a woman with a body like hers."
    "You think they really did it?"
    "And Vincent Cassel, too, in his sex-scene with her," I said.
    "But if they were really doing it," my wife said, "wouldn't the other three art thieves have demanded a scene too? The set would have been chaotic."
    I said, "Maybe we should insert the DVD back into the player...."

Note of caution: I googled on reviews to find and share a few corroborating comments and was amazed to find much praise for this film. There was, however, The New Yorker's sentence: "The only perceptible purpose of the story is to pay homage to Dawson"!
    Or The New York Times's "There are times when it feels as if Boyle’s throwing everything at the screen...and the startling sight of a naked Ms. Dawson striding toward the camera as strategically shorn as a Renaissance nude—less because he wants to distract you from the big reveal than to obscure the material’s thinness." But its review praises much more than finds fault.
    So...perhaps you shouldn't take my thumbs-down as the last word about Trance, but check it out for yourself. Anyway, you want to see that worshipful, distracting shot of Dawson coming out of the bathroom, don't you?
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Copyright © 2013 by Morris Dean

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