Mind The Gap
After a traumatic break-up with his high school
sweetheart and long-term girlfriend, recently graduated American student Simon
(Brady Corbet) heads to Europe for the Summer to lick
his wounds, get his head together and soak up some culture.
Adrift in Paris, Simon wanders the streets alone,
alienated, disengaged, until he’s lured into a strip club-cum-brothel where he
meets vulnerable prostitute Victoria (Mati Diop),
first paying for sex then entering into a tentative romance with her.
As the two become closer, Simon hatches a dangerous
scheme to blackmail Victoria’s customers.
But as Simon’s plan spirals out of control and Victoria becomes
increasingly needy, Simon’s genial mask of sanity slips, hinting at the callous,
fledgling sociopath lurking beneath.
Beautifully shot, cold and morally ambivalent, Antonio
Campos’ second feature Simon Killer is an
icy, ambiguous exercise in voyeurism and manipulation that aims to leave you as
alienated as its vacuous, amoral protagonist.
With his bland, all-American hipster good looks,
surface charm and underlying creepy neediness Simon could be any privileged,
middle class kid on a Gap year; that friendly, if boring, Mid-Western jock sat
on the stool at the end of the bar after hours in O’Neill’s, that overly chatty
guy at the urinal next to you with no regard for personal space or splashback,
that creepy stalker haunting the fringes of the dance floor.
It’s just that instead of wandering round the Far
East smoking dope, wearing tie-dyes and questioning his sexuality after a
drunken fumble with a ladyboy, Simon sexually and financially exploits a
Parisian hooker and then beats her half to death before heading home to Mom.
Sexually explicit but profoundly unerotic, Campos’
Simon is a portrait of disaffected, alienated, amoral youth. Callow and serious, he’s self-absorbed
and humourless, impossibly seems to be having less fun than the audience and,
as wonderfully played by Corbet, he’s a glib, compulsive liar and spineless
coward. Simon is a fantasist, a
voyeur with hidden shallows, and Corbet reflects the audience right back at
themselves with his dead-eyed stare.
Mati Diop as Victoria is sweet and vulnerable; she’s every privileged,
middle class kid’s fantasy woman, the stereotypical fabled hooker with a heart
of gold. Their doomed amour fou
while predictable is undercut with a mounting sense of dread and unease.
Wintry and mesmerising without ever being engaging,
Simon Killer has plenty of Simon but precious little killing and manages to
make being fingered by a Parisian hooker look unexciting.
David Watson
Directed by:
Written by:
Produced by:
Starring:
Genre:
Drama
Language:
English
Runtime:
1 hour 41 minutes (approx.)
Certificate:
18
UK Release Date:
Friday 12th April 2013
Rating:
2/5
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