Fugitive Pieces is based on the novel by Anne Michaels, a book which I, like most people I know, read about 20 pages of before giving up. (Sorry... I can only handle so much “beautiful writing.”) It’s the story of Jakob Beer, who as a young Polish boy watches Nazis massacre his entire family (including his beloved older sister Bella). After fleeing into the forest, he is rescued by Athos (Rade Serbedzija), a kindly Greek archeologist who smuggles the boy back home with him to the idyllic island of Eidos, raising him on a diet of lamb, fish and old Greek folk sayings.
After the war ends, Athos accepts a teaching job at the University of Toronto, where Jakob (now played by Stephen Dillane) grows up into a successful writer of insufferably pretentious-sounding books and the lover of Alex, a beautiful, high-spirited blond shiksa (Rosamund Pike). The loss of Bella continues to weigh heavily on Jakob’s mind, though. It’s only after many years; many, many return trips to Greece; and many, many, many scenes of Jakob staring expressionlessly at old photographs that he’s able to find true happiness with a new lover, Michaela (Ayelet Zurer), who finds Jakob’s morose personality, nondescript looks and tendency to follow sex with long, melancholy monologues about how his sister was raped and killed by Nazi soldiers inexplicably alluring.
Fugitive Pieces was written and directed by Toronto-born filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa, who has worked on a long list of high-profile TV dramas, including Six Feet Under, Rome, The Riches, Dexter, Nip/Tuck, and many, many more. Podeswa is by all accounts an efficient, professional director: he gets along with actors, he can adhere to a tight schedule and he can deliver good-looking footage without any distracting auteurist indulgences getting in the way.
Whenever Podeswa turns his hand to features, his shortcomings become more apparent. He has a problem with pacing, uses dull visual metaphors and maintains a very Canadian kind of emotional reticence. Podeswa’s previous films, The Five Senses and Eclipse, are everything people hate about Canadian movies — the kind of superficially “intelligent,” “arty” indie fare that doesn’t actually do anything to startle your brain or your eye.
In Dillane, Podeswa has found his perfect leading man — as Jakob, Dillane gives a performance so locked-in, so bloodless, so starved of vitality, it’s almost like some kind of acting stunt. It’s as if he and Podeswa decided to see if it was possible for someone to go through an entire movie without doing anything even the slightest bit interesting.
How in the world did Podeswa extract this performance from Dillane? Did he demand multiple takes from him to the point of exhaustion, like David Fincher did to his cast on the set of Zodiac? Did he hypnotize him before the cameras started rolling, like Werner Herzog did to the cast of Heart of Glass? Or did he just show him the dailies of Fugitive Pieces and crush his spirit that way, setting up an infinite feedback loop of dullness?
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