When we’ve lost a little part of ourselves, it’s difficult not to watch helplessly as the hole spreads outward to other aspects of our lives. The characters in writer/director/star Alice Englert’s feature debut behind the camera either understand this at the start or come to realize it by force over the course of Bad Behaviour. This is a universal truth, obviously, and it’s a strong idea around which to formulate the plot and character development of a movie. One just wishes that the forcefulness of its ideas matched the conviction Englert obviously had behind the scenes. The filmmaker, after all, is herself both an actress and a daughter to a legend of the screen (Jane Campion, to be precise). One hopes that this story has nothing autobiographical in it, but we can be certain that the starting point is one of compassion and understanding.
For a while, in fact, the movie is a pointed and sobering tale, primarily following Lucy (Jennifer Connelly) through a journey of the mind and the spirit. That journey brings her to the doorstep of a cult surrounding the unique personality named Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw, who smartly underplays things enough to come across as a bit of a cypher, if not really a creep). He runs a facility for lost women whom he has manipulated to be in his orbit, and Lucy, a former child actress who once starred in a television sitcom, is simply his latest victim. She doesn’t see herself as one in this environment, though, which looks a lot better than the life she led before. Her relationship with her mother was destructive, and as icing on the proverbial cake, Lucy developed an eating disorder as a coping mechanism.
The film works – and quite well, too – in these early stretches exploring how Elon’s group digs its claws into these women with the various rules given to and expectations placed upon them. As one example, an overarching message seems to be the shedding of all emotional triggers, and so Elon might tell them that, for the period of one day, they should not feel hope or enthusiasm. It’s an intensely problematic place, of course, but his near-quiescence as a personality somehow lays itself over all of them like a shroud. When a younger model named Beverly (Dasha Nekrasova), recognizable to some as being the face of fragrance campaign, arrives at the facility after deducing that it was a better option than suicide, Lucy is often paired with her for the various activities of the group.
To say this doesn’t work out is an understatement. A definitive and shocking act of violence jars the film into its second act and more directly introduces Lucy’s daughter Dylan (Englert) into the picture. Once this happens, and once we’ve settled into Dylan’s side of the story, the whole affair sinks into a type of melodrama that could have been perfectly avoidable. Connelly’s performance remains potent, which is a good thing, but the character becomes a frustratingly inconsistent one for reasons entirely separate from Lucy’s clear mental health issues. There is a difference, after all, between troubled and frustrating.
For her part, Dylan’s story is far less striking than her mother’s. Similar maternal issues plague the young woman, who has followed her mother into the Hollywood system, working as a stuntwoman on various sci-fi and fantasy projects. An injury lands her in need of a long break from working on sets, and that’s when the incident (which won’t be revealed here) between Lucy and Beverly happens. Determined to see something through with regard to her mom, Dylan agrees to sit down with a lawyer (Karan Gill) to discuss their options after the incident becomes a legal quagmire.
It’s simply less interesting, more schematic, and just as much of a soap opera as it sounds, which is especially disappointing after nearly an hour of the movie proves it understands Lucy and her plight. A befuddled shrug is the only thing met by the final scene, meanwhile, which is meant to acknowledge some resolution within the characters. Bad Behaviour has since failed to prove that it has earned such a clear-eyed idea and, instead, simply comes across as too-tidy manipulation.
Photo courtesy of Gravitas Ventures
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