Juniper is a darkly comic-edged drama about a fragmented family and the unexpectedly vital influence of its particularly irritated matriarch. In the title role is Charlotte Rampling, an actor blessed with an epically despicable side eye capable of withering a vase of flowers from across the room.
The film relies heavily on Rampling’s ability to deliver intensity with small gestures, because for most of the time she is almost motionless, rendered almost inert by a broken leg and a mysterious underlying health condition, while his temper is inflamed by a large quantity of the gin served to him in large glass jugs.
The first feature from New Zealand writer-director Matthew J Saville (not to be confused with Australian filmmaker Matt Saville), Juniper plays with the conventions of films about families coming together in difficult circumstances, which they learn to overcome their differences only after a while. excruciating trial and error.
Saville and Rampling worked on revising the script for three days after their first meeting in Paris. Two weeks later, Rampling officially accepted the role. (Provided: Transmission)
In particular, it deals with an intergenerational connection between Ruth and her grandson Sam (George Ferrier), a suicidal teenager who attends a nearby private school and has never recovered from his mother’s death.
Sam’s athletic looks and crown of golden hair give off the aura of a confident private school jock, but this is a film where appearances are deceiving, and Sam is troubled by his privilege, while Ruth, in turn, it is the unlikely figure that rolls. him out of his discomfort.
Set in the 1990s, the film takes place in a grand, if run-down, house in a green, leafy New Zealand location. This family is rich, of course, and when Ruth arrives from her home in England after a considerable absence and in poor health, it initially seems like she might be the direct link to a bloodline in the Old Country.
“Juniper is a very personal story based on my experiences as a teenager,” Saville writes in her director’s statement. (Provided: Transmission)
Ruth has an unconventional past, as a war correspondent who once traveled the world witnessing some of the best and worst of humanity. The experience marked her, we will learn, but it also gained her valuable wisdom.
His drinking, as well as his bullying, seem to be a manifestation of some kind of PTSD, long simmering and untreated. Her grandson, who is left to help look after her while his father (an excellent but mostly off-screen Marton Csokas) is called away to England, becomes the main target of her grudge .
The two are destined to become unlikely friends, but it takes time. As is often the case in scripts about grumpy old people and their influence on teenagers with their lives ahead of them, Ruth’s abrasiveness serves a purpose, even if it isn’t initially clear.
Hal Ashby’s 1971 absurdist black comedy Harold and Maude dealt with some of these intergenerational currents, including teenage depression, with a little more imagination and less predictability. It would have been nice if Saville’s film hadn’t heeded so dutifully to the redemptive notes of its final act.
The role of Ruth was inspired by Saville’s grandmother Moccy, whom he described in The Spinoff as a “smart, funny and sometimes brutal” woman.
But Rampling is worth watching, even if you sense where it’s all headed. The role recalls her performance in another mostly house-bound film, Francois Ozon’s 2003 Mysterious Pool, in which she played a cranky British author trying to write her next novel, clashing with the young and feisty daughter of his French publisher.
Saville doesn’t opt for any of this film’s dreamy Hitchcockian intrigue, but he does exploit the rambling grandeur of the house, with its shadowy rooms and thresholds offering views of New Zealand’s green and slightly gothic landscape .
Nasty indie rock and subtle zooms help create an atmosphere of melancholy and cloistered tension, which extends to Sam’s posh high school with its dark hallways and neurotic order.
Saville also manages to create an emotional authenticity to Ruth and Sam’s difficult relationship, although it’s a shame he doesn’t spend more time on their stage of mutual distrust.
As Rampling guides the film to its eventual emotional thaw, along the way she shows an occasionally startling range, in one particularly poignant scene where she crawls gracelessly across the floor to reach a jug of alcohol.
Rampling is one of the great actors of his generation who remains a vital presence in everything he does. Par excellence English, but inexorably linked to European cinema (he has lived and worked in France for decades), he possesses a sharpness and nuance that have never left him at the different stages of his career.
“The film is not sentimental … which is what I liked. I don’t like sentimentality,” Rampling told The Australian. (Supplied: Transmission)
After starting out as a model, he had his first roles in English films during the 1960s before moving to the continent, becoming synonymous with the pinnacle of European auteur cinema in the 1970s. such as Visconti’s The Damned and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter.
His work ethic and versatility have underpinned a prolific career ever since, and despite his professional Eurocentrism, he earned an Academy Award nomination for the 2015 drama 45 Years, and continues with his role in the Hollywood juggernaut Dune ( part two released next year), where she brings a welcome gravitas.
At the center of this unassuming and likable New Zealand drama, emanates a rich sense of layered character. When you consider that Saville barely gives the audience much more than a few mock shots of Ruth’s past and just a couple of background anecdotes, it’s a tribute to Rampling’s subtly embodied performance that the character emerges so fully format
As the shades of regret and rage in his performance give way to warmer undertones of love and kindness, not to mention an appetite for fun, he lends credibility to the film’s slightly worn conceit, and even inspires a persistent hobby.
Juniper is in theaters now.
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