Marling is an unusually gifted screenwriter
SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Director Zal Batmanglij and actress Brit Marling first came to attention with 2011’s Sound of My Voice, one of that year’s most fascinating (and overlooked) films. They co-wrote its screenplay, and Marling played its central character: 'Maggie’, the enigmatic leader of a religious cult, hidden away in a Los Angeles suburb, who claimed to have returned from the year 2054 to prepare a few enlightened members of humanity for the cataclysms which lay ahead.
Made for a tiny budget, it was mysterious, claustrophobic and thoroughly compelling—and not so enamoured of its own (admittedly inspired) premise as to not take a few extraordinary risks. One scene—in which Maggie was persuaded to sing, for her followers, a song popular in her own time—was a coup de théatre so audacious, it could have derailed the entire movie; instead, it made it. As the twists kept coming, you found yourself wondering: was Maggie the fraud she seemed? Or was she, just perhaps, a genuine time-traveller? The ending, thrillingly ambiguous, took care to leave the question unanswered . . . and the path open for a possible sequel.
This one, written while trying to raise financing for that debut, reportedly came out of a two-month period the pair spent living among 'freegans’—eco-conscious political activists who eat only discarded food in their quest for a cash-free, anti-consumerist existence. Batmanglij and Marling claim to have immersed themselves in this alternate lifestyle: scavenging from bins with their new friends, hopping freight trains, sleeping rough. And, along the way, developing a real sense of the protest movements popping up, like weeds, across the US.
The result is a refined sort of espionage thriller. Marling plays Sarah Moss, an undercover agent for a firm specialising in counter-intelligence, who is charged with a mission: to penetrate a cell of domestic terrorists, known only as The East, who have been targetting CEOs and board members of various corporations responsible for polluting the environment.
Her path to The East is credibly handled, a series of false leads and accidents; eventually, though, she stumbles upon them, and slowly gains their trust—only to find herself falling under the spell of their leader, Benji (economically played by Alexander Skarsgard, who looks scarily like J. Tillman throughout). Finally, inspired by the group’s most passionate ideologue (a typically fine Ellen Page), Sarah begins to question her own beliefs . . .
They’re working, this time, with a bigger budget—and some name actors. (The cast also includes Patricia Clarkson and Julia Ormond.) Ridley Scott and his late brother Tony produce, along with Marling herself. Yet what’s especially interesting is how this second film corresponds with its predecessor, simultaneously repeating and subverting it. The theme is the same: the unusual susceptibility of conviction to persuasion. Once again, the story concerns the infiltration of a closed group—in the first film, the cult, in this one, an organisation of eco-terrorists; here, as there, the leader is both charismatic and contradictory. And once again, the newcomer finds their allegiances shifting, and their previously rock-solid certainties unravelling, in the face of information and experience.
An unusually fluent director, Batmanglij has a talent for the arresting visual image—as when one of The East, wearing a grinning paper mask, looks directly into the camera and suddenly passes out, still 'smiling’ as he falls to the ground—and a rare gift for devising physical actions to make character points. A dinner table scene here, with all the diners obliged to wear straitjackets, manages to be ingenious and funny and profound all at once, its payoff as powerful as it is simple; likewise, a lengthy game of spin-the-bottle, which neatly encapsulates (and complicates) the tangle of affections and rivalries within the cell.
On the basis of these two films and Another Earth—which she also co-scripted—Marling is an unusually gifted screenwriter. Much is currently being made of Lena Dunham’s supposed genius, but as new talents go, I admire Marling more, for the simple reason that Dunham’s ruthless mining of her own experience strikes me as a failure of imagination as much as empathy. A solipsist, she can conceive nothing beyond herself; Marling, by contrast, seems determined to write about everything but.
She’s also an extremely talented actress, the blankness of her manner—that flattened voice, her remote, almost distracted air—playing nicely off her alert and watchful eyes. Which miss nothing, and convey vast reserves of determination and unease. She delivers her dialogue in a soft contralto, carefully modulated, yet can invest a throwaway line with enough playfulness or ambiguity to make it sing; a scene here in which she’s ordered by Benji to flirt with a businessman’s loutish son at a cocktail party—one of the film’s most unsettling set-pieces—displays her range to dazzling effect.
Fusing the anti-corporate paranoia of '70s thrillers like The Parallex View with a more modern, post-Occupy sensibility, it struck me as a triumph: smart, notably uncondescending, utterly gripping. There are a handful of missteps—in the final act, mostly—but these are infelicities of tone, not weaknesses in storytelling; overall, it’s more satisfying, and more provocative, than any mainstream drama I’ve seen so far this year. I can only hope Batmanglij and Marling continue their collaboration: these two clearly inspire the best in each other.
Watch 'The East'
Wednesday 12 August, 8:30pm on SBS Viceland
M
UK, 2013
Genre: Action, Drama, Mystery
Language: English
Director: Zal Batmanglij
Starring: Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, Ellen Page, Aldis Hodge, Patricia Clarkson
