Exhibition – A Film by Joanna Hogg – 05/05/2014

There are four starring roles in Joanna Hogg’s film – Playing as big a part as the two main protagonists D and H are the house they live in and the film’s soundtrack.

Viv Albertine and Liam Gillick play artists D and H, who occupy, or perhaps belong to, a modernist house which they are preparing to sell. The reasons for this are never made explicit, but it is clear that they both love and feel somewhat controlled by the structure.

The house itself was the Kensington home of its architect James Melvin until his death in 2012 and the film is dedicated to him. It is a modernist building of clean lined rectilinear spaces, glass walls and spiral staircases, and the way the film is shot by cinematographer Ed Rutherford makes the most of its transparent yet confining qualities. Often its inhabitants are seen almost like reptiles in a vivarium, with D sometimes curling up on floors and ledges, moulding herself to the walls.

There is a constant discomfort as we watch the pair going about their lives, each cocooned in their own separate workrooms and communicating by internal telephone. H goes for night-time walks in the city to the dismay of D, who appears increasingly afraid to go out at all. They seem to be on a knife edge with their own relationship but become conspiratorial in company, in their plotting to prevent the estate agents from selling to the wrong type of buyer and staging a deft escape from a cloying dinner party.

Particularly noteworthy in these two performances and in Hogg’s direction is in the astonishing naturalness of the dialogue and the apparent ordinariness of the situations which really does make us feel as though we are voyeurs into these scenes of uneasy, brittle domesticity. We can see that there are strains on the relationship but, as with the motives for selling the house, we are left to draw our own conclusions as to what causes the tension. In the end these people have become like objects in the exhibition that their life becomes.

Central to creating this atmosphere is the extraordinary use of sound in the film. There is no score at all other than three or four bits of source music, but the sound design by Jovan Ajder strikes you from the very outset. Great swathes of the film have little or no dialogue but are accompanied by a vivid, three dimensional soundscape. From the quiet rumble of the heating system, through the sound of doors and footsteps to the cacophony of the street noises outside, everything is hyper-real as though nerves are on edge. Even the silence, when it happens, is deafening.

There are some surreal, dream-like scenes, in one of which D walks through Trafalgar Square and stops to watch fire-tuba player Krzysztof Werkowicz playing his legendary instrument to the strains of “King was in his Counting House”. This is also the music we hear over the closing credits.

Exhibition is truly mesmerising film-making. Go to see it, even if only to watch the craft of it.

I saw Exhibition, which is now on limited UK release, at FACT Liverpool. It is also available for on demand rental at the BFI website.