The Perfection: Alright, Surprise Me

I try to go into films entirely open to what they’re trying to do, with as few preconceptions as possible. Scary movies are about being taken for a ride, and the best ones feel like maybe you’ve gotten onto a roller coaster that’s overdue for its safety inspection. But sometimes that sort of blind viewing isn’t possible. The ubiquity and rapid response time of Internet coverage of pop culture means that it’s getting more and more difficult to approach films knowing nothing about them, and for especially high-profile films, it takes a decent chunk of work to remain unspoiled. In the past, I’ve found that a film’s cultural prominence has robbed it of its power for me, and for that matter, my original pick for this week was an adaptation of a story I’d already read, and I changed my mind about watching it a few minutes in, because I really wanted something that would be surprising for me.

The Perfection was definitely surprising - a twisting, stylized melodrama that kept me on my toes and troubled me in roughly equal measure.

The film opens on an elderly woman, lying motionless in bed, eyes open but unseeing. Everything is very still, and she is even more still than that. There are bottles of pills, all kinds of medicine, and people whispering outside in the hallway. A younger woman sits watching the unmoving older woman. They are mother and daughter. Charlotte Willmore has just lost her mother after a long, long illness and years of being her caregiver. Once affairs are settled, Charlotte makes a phone call to reconnect with two people she knew long ago. She wants to join them, to go where they are. There is a sense of picking back up a life set aside for a very long time.

This takes her to Shanghai, and a concert by a celebrated young cellist named Elizabeth Wells. As it transpires, Charlotte, like Elizabeth, was once a student at the elite Bachoff Academy of Music, and it is the heads of that academy - Anton and Paloma Bachoff - that she’s called, with whom she’s meeting. They are delighted to see her, the protégé whose stellar career was cut short by her mother’s illness, ready to rejoin the fold. Charlotte and Elizabeth meet and hit it off in a big way. An evening of drinking and dance and sex resolves into Elizabeth asking Charlotte to come with her on a trip into rural Western China for a few days, to get off the grid for awhile and away from the pressures of being one of the finest classical cellists in the world. Charlotte agrees, and off they go, still rumpled and a little hung over, on a rickety bus into the country.

And that’s when things start going violently, awfully wrong.

It’s really difficult to say much more than that, because this film’s biggest strength is the way it largely defies predictability. It starts off very much as a lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-decadent story (I mean, come on - Anton? Paloma?) set among the fine arts elite, but neatly and swiftly upends that expectation with turns into body horror, slasher films, and revenge thrillers, all the while maintaining a tone of high melodrama in the writing, the acting, and the composition. Nothing is what it seems here, in terms of the people OR the story, but a consistent style ties all of it together nicely. It’s not naturalistic at all - camera angles, sudden intrusive cuts and vivid color highlight interior emotional states, and flashbacks are presented in a way that highlight the artificiality of the narrative. It all begins feeling very much like a drama about someone who has just suffered a terrible loss and is trying to rebuild their whole life before setting that expectation on fire in favor of becoming progressively more and more unhinged.

And as far as that goes, I was pleasantly impressed. The other side of this, however, is that all of this is in the service of a story with some troubling elements, and I’m not sure if it treats them with the gravity they deserve. Without giving too much away, all is not well at the Bachoff Academy of Music, there is a price to pay for being the best, and there is to be a reckoning for all of this. The idea of an elite academy of the arts with punishing methods is not a new one - if I were to be especially unkind, I’d say this film sometimes feels like a direct-to-video take on Black Swan in places - but part of this is the abuse of young girls and the nature of mental illness, and though there’s nothing overly egregious to me in how they handle these things, they’re also not the sort of things you can (or should, in my opinion) just sort of hang a film on without nuance or care, and that left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

On the other hand , that this film doesn’t even pretend to be interested in nuance, so much as it is in wringing all of the pulp from the story that it can and careening it around a track until the wheels fly off, well, that gives it a bracing, lunatic energy that made it worth watching. I wanted to be surprised, and boy, did I ever get it.

IMDB entry
Available on Netflix