Emotional drama shows the 3 sides of a coin.
Human emotions-the somewhat complicated and unscientific frontier of choices and reactions that encompass every single dominator of film characters in film history. This British number is not different, and directors Neil Hunter and Tom Hunsinger set out to paint a portrait that ranges from the lukewarm to the abhorrence of feelings we folks tend to have.
“Courage versus considerationâ€. Lawless Heart’s victims and/or survivors of life’s cruel games seem to find themselves in this contortion, that starts off as someone’s story and then transfers itself into another character’s tale and at the end of it all we are left with plenty of characters inside a well-devised story. Stuart is the dead boyfriend, Stuart’s in the Stuart’s restaurant, Lucy is Stuart’s boyfriend, Judy is the over-concerned sister and Charlie is a girl. In a story arch that his sectored into three parts we have a casualty of character’s, kind of like a revolving door narrative where some characters drop out of sight and some are placed in focus. This is about the giant loop of life, with a small town thinking, some of the characters lose the knack for full living, relationships feel like old pairs of knickers and some people feel like the missing glove of a former pair or make others feel miserable, while some rejuvenate themselves through conflicts, sexual relations and/or by caring for one another.
I’m not sure if this is a real pleasure to watch especially with the cigarette-colored depressive grey toned characters. Nor I’m I sure that the dramatic tone really suits this film, perhaps a comedy-noir approach and a little zest in the quality of the picture could have given me a sense of really wanting to see this film with care until the end. What I did enjoy about the film, are the characters that get tangled up by their changes in identity, their pursuits for happiness and multitude of perspectives that this is presented in- a kind of rewind flashback that I last saw in The Rules of Attraction. The first story is uniquely empty in comparison to the other two, and the multiple angle-ness aspect of the pic sometimes contains some rather long stretches of dullness.
A project like Lawless Heart could have added a little more to a talkative autopsy in human emotions with a closer examination and treatment of some of the characters, limiting the number or giving us a more in-depth access to the character’s emotions. For a Brits, and fans of such heavy dramas one notch below the magnitude of a Secrets & Lies, there is enough content and context to be entertained, for the rest it might just become as tasteful as a serving of fish and chips type of experience.
