Joanna Hogg's intimate portrait of married life is her finest offering yet.
If, as the saying goes, home is where the heart is, then inExhibition it is also sanctuary to the mind, body and soul. Uncommonly attuned to gradations between cognitive existence and physical experience, British director Joanna Hogg’s third feature turns aesthetic determinism into a narrative framework by which action directly corresponds with the surrounding environment.
The film’s simple story, concerning a husband and wife in the process of selling their home of many years, is rendered complex by an internal compositional logic which reflects tremors among the couple and their modernist surroundings alike. In Exhibition, architecture translates as the physical, psychological and emotional infrastructure of its characters — one seemingly cannot advance without altering the material identity of the other.
The film opens and closes in curiously similar fashion, with the character of the wife, known only as D (played by Viv Albertine of British post-punk legends the Slits), contorting herself around inanimate constructions throughout the house. Her husband, H (Liam Gillick), seems the more pragmatic of the two, accommodating brokers (including one played by Tom Hiddleston) and working diligently as a conceptual artist in his home office.
When not folding herself around various objects, D, also an artist, spends her time working out performance pieces which invariably devolve into either exhibitionist displays for her neighbours or exercises in personal pleasure. She’s frustrated — sexually, professionally and emotionally. She shuts down H’s intimate advances only to satisfy herself as he sleeps quietly by her side. Her life appears to be one elaborate artistic display, except there’s an unsettling hollowness to her gestures that suggests an unspoken longing.
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