Joanna Hogg's latest distinctive exercise in the cinema of middle-class unease finds two artists trapped in a modernist house that has become the third person in their emptily overcrowded marriage. Former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine is D, wrestling with the contortions of performance art by a voyeuristically shuttered window, while her husband H (artist Liam Gillick) pootles away on his computer screens in the room above.
The two are joined by an intercom system that is used for perfunctory communication ("Shall we have sex?"; "Can you fix the boiler?"), and joined by a spiral staircase that resembles a gigantic helix of DNA, adding to the sense that the house is an organic object. Relationships between the couple are seemingly strained by an imbalance of sexual desire (he wants to "play"; she masturbates alone), a residue of professional friction (D rebuffs H's constant attempts to "contribute" to her art), and the spectre of an impending move that may signify either a beginning or an end, the latter bolstered by fragmentary echoes of encroaching Haneke-esque horror. Conversation is clipped, with noises from the street (which, symbolically, is being torn up) more dominant than any dialogue, and an absence of music allowing the ambient sounds to clatter around the hard-surfaced living spaces to alienating effect.
As with Hogg's previous films, Unrelated and Archipelago, there's an underlying desire to scream at the suffocatingly insular bourgeois ennui; certainly, Exhibition requires both patience and tolerance to get beneath its chilly surface. But under the uninviting skin there's an honest depiction of the ebb and flow of a long-term relationship between two people whose passions affix to objects other than each other; who remain co-dependent, if distant; and whose often queasily frank interactions (played out in unforgiving single takes) seem utterly genuine and not a little uncomfortable. Add to this an element of surreal invention (past and present intertwining, personalities fracturing) and Exhibition reaffirms Hogg's status as a distinctive, singular and challenging voice of British cinema.
