Harry Wootliff’s latest film is a sensual tale of tainted love, told from a refreshingly feminine perspective.
★★★✰✰
Adapted from the Deborah Kay Davies novel True Things About Me, the newest film from emerging British filmmaker Harry Wootliff has the air of literary fiction.
Our protagonist is Kate (Ruth Wilson), a 30-something JobCentre work coach who has an affair with a new benefits claimant (played by Tom Burke), and saved in her phone simply as “Blond”. On the frontlines of a callous system, the pressures on Kate to conform feel stifling. All her friends seem to be married with kids, and we get the sense that Kate assumes her future, however far off it may be, inevitably lies here. Instead, her relationship with Blond pushes her heart to its limit, and proves that there’s more to her than she ever even considered.
Ruth Wilson and Tom Burke are perfectly cast here, offering electrifying chemistry at the best of times, and a more uneven energy when the pairing is pushed to their limits. Burke, off the back of playing yet another seemingly anthropomorphised red flag in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, is well suited to playing the enigmatic stranger . It’s his assertiveness that turns Kate on, stealing the first kiss before ordering her to remove her panties in a parking lot. Wilson makes us feel the fluttering of Kate’s stomach in moments like this, even bringing some sensual breathing to their simple text exchanges (which take place in the JobCentre bathroom, since employees are banned from using their phones). But True Things reminds us that there is genuine danger behind all this risqué behaviour, as Blond quickly proves to be too much to handle.
The film features numerous instances of Kate’s fantasies of exhibitionist sex, centred around her own gratification. Oral sex features heavily in her imagination and whilst Blond is capable of fulfilling her sexually, he rarely offers her the same courtesy in their relationship. In fact, what he does offer is some grade-A gaslighting, and an uninspired theme in True Things is how the very same power dynamics which seem to get Kate off are far from the bedrock stable relationships are built upon.
Some may say this is all too predictable, but the film manages to find a surprising degree of excitement within this well trodden ground. Cinematographer Ashley Connor draws out the vibrancy of blues and reds in the atmosphere, with some sensual scenes in a forest being saturated to draw out the teal-like blues in the scenery—evoking Call Me By Your Name more than the British countryside. Kate herself is strongly associated with the colour red, the vibrancy of which shifts and changes with her swirling psychological state. Similarly, the boxy Academy Ratio evokes the constricting nature of Kate’s work in the opening moments, but later gives way to a more intimate focus on the passionate encounters between her and Blond.
It’s all well and good that the film is a delight in these respects, since the story ultimately proves to be lacking in direction once we arrive at the final act. However, despite True Things inevitably running out of steam, Wootliff has managed to take a remarkably plain page-turner, and turn it into a psychologically textured piece of woman’s fiction.
The Verdict
True Things is a wonderfully expressive portrayal of feminine desire, whose subdued story is made up for by Wootliff’s tender handling of the material.
Words by Jake Abatan
True Things is showing in cinemas from April 1
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