Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
Five stars
Pull back the gold curtain and you’re in another world
for what might be a never-ending screening of Spite Your Face, Rachel Maclean’s
troublingly incisive thirty-seven-minute film-based fantasia, which comes home to
Talbot Rice after first being seen in Venice last year. Drawn from The
Adventures of Pinocchio, the Italian folk-tale charting the adventures of the
little puppet-boy whose nose grows every time he tells a lie, Maclean’s dark reimagining
is as shockingly un-Disney in its depiction of greed-induced brutality as the
moment when Bambi’s mum got shot.
Maclean focuses on the rise and fall of Pic, a
shell-suited urchin who buys his way into a blinged-up wonderland of
glam-tastic delights, only to discover his celebrity lifestyle is on credit,
and has been built on the flakiest of falsehoods.
All of Maclean’s pop-cultural tropes are intact, from
its candy-coloured kids’ TV animated back-drops, to its ugly excursions into Shopping
Channel hard-sell. Maclean plays every part with face-painted, digitally and
prosthetically-enhanced relish in a production which, like the Oliver
Twist/Prince and the Pauper-based Please Sir…(2014), lays bare the gaping divide
between rich and poor. Except here she goes in even harder, angrier and more
ruthless.
Consumer culture is exposed as a bloodied act of
self-harm, a self-loathing short-term hit that gives men in power especially the
sort of nosed-up sense of entitlement that causes them to believe they can get
away with murder. Maclean may have made her film on the back of Trump and co’s
ongoing grotesquerie, but given everything that has happened in the world since
then in terms of bloated rich men being caught with their pants down, Spite
Your Face looks even more frighteningly of the moment. As Pic’s travails are looped
without definitive beginning or end, it suggests a fable for a patriarchy that’s
just crashed back down to earth.
The List, March 2018
ends
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