Actor-turned-filmmaker Alice Englert’s “Bad Behaviour” is a dirty bomb of a movie, and it almost seems intentionally devised to keep the viewer off-balance. What at first appears a rather obvious send-up of self-help culture turns into a take-no-prisoners assault on narrative expectations and norms, all the while painting a pointed portrait of a truly complicated protagonist, the kind of character whose motivations and intentions are so slippery, you can barely make up your mind about her before she gives you a reason to change it again.
Her name is Lucy, and she’s played by Jennifer Connelly with the kind of spiky verve you can perhaps only muster up when you won your Oscar long ago to stop giving a damn. We’re introduced to her as she’s listening to self-help tapes while driving, and texting, and yelling at other drivers, and calling her daughter Dylan (Englert) in New Zealand. Lucy is en route to a “semi-silent retreat in the wilderness”; Dylan is off working as a stunt-person on a big international production. It’s clear, from jump street, that theirs is a strained relationship – Dylan ends the call with a “love you” that sounds more like an insult than an assurance.
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At the retreat, Lucy and several other wealthy seeker types alternate between sessions of forced silence and blathering group therapy, sharing their secrets (and silently judging); sometimes they break off into small groups, and talk around each other. The guru, perhaps not coincidentally, is named Elon – Elon Bello, to be precise, and he’s played with a truly inspired hand by Ben Whishaw as the kind of moody “engima” whom you somehow know everything about, right off the bat. He offers nonsensical instructions (“I encourage you not to smile at each other”) and uninspired commentary (“Does anyone relate to this?”), and he’s mostly surrounded by vapid sycophants.
Yet, through these sessions, we do get to know Lucy, and to understand (sort of) what drives her. In years past, she was something of a famous actor, star of the television show “Flora the Fierce,” about a “warrior princess” (the character’s first name seems too direct a shout-out, so I hope Englert is prepared for those questions on the press tour). She looks back on the gig without much fondness, referencing “the money I made playing a character who gave me a teenage eating disorder,” and her bitterness seems justified. But Connelly is too gifted an actor, and Englert too smart a screenwriter, to stop at the bitterness. They’re doing something genuinely tricky here, crafting a character who is trying, who’s doing the work, who knows what she should think and say, but just cannot stifle her lifelong, carefully curated cynicism.
“Well, sometimes I’m just a cunt,” she shrugs, but it’s not as simple as that, and there is something beyond mere moodiness in her withering contempt for the model/influencer (Dasha Nekrasova) who mostly seems to have attended the retreat for the ‘gram opportunities. The more they interact, the more it seems that she represents something specific and upsetting to Lucy – that she sees, in this self-obsessed nitwit, everything that is coarse and soulless and vapid about the industry she (sort of) escaped. Yet the therapy also starts to do what therapy does, to unlock the pain of her past: “I wasn’t enough for my mother. Or the father of my child. Or my child.” Connelly is doing some of the most raw, open-wound acting of her career here; it’s a multi-layered performance, veering dangerously between the harmless cynic, the pained survivor, and the ticking bomb waiting to go off. (It’s also a bravura comic turn, as she delivers her bone-dry, wry dialogue with the skill and precision of a surgeon.)
The Dylan thread seems, at first, somewhat grafted on – there’s certainly not as much happening in it as in Lucy’s story, and the screen time is comparatively minimal. But it doesn’t really matter, because Dylan is such a fascinating character, a danger-seeking tough broad who keeps her regrets and sensitivity safely locked away, only to find that lock isn’t quite as hard to pick as she thought. It also helps that Englert is such a rambunctious screen presence; we keep watching simply to see what she’ll say next, and the sprung, off-kilter way she’ll say it.
The retreat is so well-established and specifically populated that it’s a genuine shock when a big event, heading into the third act, spins the movie into altogether unfamiliar territory; I wouldn’t dream of giving it away, but it left this viewer’s mouth agape, stunned not by just what happens, but that first-time feature filmmaker Englert has the stones to shake the snow globe so drastically. Suffice it to say that Lucy has something of a psychotic break, while things take a turn for the worse for her daughter pretty much simultaneously (“I thought I was doing pretty well but I think I might actually be at quite a low point in my life?”). And so they’re finally put together, their stories and characters and crises colliding at full throttle, and the more time they spend together, the clearer it becomes that Lucy hasn’t only broken herself.
Englert doesn’t quite know when to take the W – there are a couple of endings too many, a sense that its closing scenes are encores for an audience that’s ready to gather their things and go. But in an industry where even the independent offerings are increasingly veering into safe and predictable “content,” it’s genuinely thrilling to watch a filmmaker with a specific voice and oddball style taking genuine risks, and the way she successfully navigates these tonal transitions, how she cuts the cynicism with sincerity and vice versa – well, it’s kind of miracle. “Bad Behavior” is strange, savage, and oddly beautiful, and it announces Alice Englert as one to watch. [B+]
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