The Escape
Being the housewife of some boring office drone in the suburbs is so boring, it’s enough to have get severe undiagnosed depression. Going on a lone unplanned vacation to Paris doesn’t really help, idiots trying to fuck you also exist over there.
A regular McNormal Suburban Family of 2.3 children unravels when the mother gets clinically depressed, but not only nobody helps her, they make it worse.
Think about it from her perspective: your husband is not “evil”, just a chav in a suit, a senseless member of the human race, dead from the neck up. The kids are brats, as any 5 years old. Every acquaintance (basically your mum) thinks you are crazy for having a dream life or mind numbing household chores, child rearing, and marital rape. There are no therapists.
She mentions to the hubby she is not happy, maybe she could do an art course or something, anything over just be around the house just living, and he semi-nods then fondles her tits.
After snapping over yet another outburst, she just gets on the Eurostar and gets her ass to Paris. Just walking around, seeing museums, taking in the sights and sounds of a large city with strangers. Being courted by a dude your age doesn’t go very well, he lies about being married.
Then it ends, with some unexplained characters popping up from nowhere and with the same sequence as it started with, slightly changed.
This is so extremely British, apparently the script had no written dialogue, it was all improvised. The stiff upper lip ethos remains ingrained. From what I can tell, depressed middle aged woman in France pull an Emmanuelle, this is extremely tame and guilt ridden.
The kind of film that should have trigger warnings for extreme depressive moods. Gemma Arterton carries the film easily, but she could use an hug after this ordeal. Even she thinks this is a sacrifice for the greater good. The most unbelievable thing is the director is the kid from Barry Lyndon!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.