It’s been a while since a movie has been so good at textures, both visual and aural. In Satisfaction you get an extremely clear sense of the sensations the characters are experiencing and the world through which they are moving. The plot in itself is much less pleasant, as it’s mostly about a young woman avoiding a problem, but my goodness the way it’s delivered makes Satisfaction worth seeing.
Lola (Emma Laird) and her posh boyfriend Philip (a visibly uncomfortable Fionn Whitehead) are staying in a colossal mansion on a Greek island. They are composers under deadline for a joint recording contract, but Lola is blocked and keeping quiet. Their relationship seems to be in trouble, so the vibes are off and they’re not spending a lot of time together. But not many people on this island are under fifty, so local osteopath Elena (the wonderful Zar Amir Ebrahimi) does not hesitate to make their acquaintance. Extensive flashbacks about the start of Philip and Lola’s relationship show us that Lola’s previous partner was a woman called Angela (Adwoa Aboah). This means the connection between Lola and Elena has a subtext that absolutely nobody misses. The subtext between Philip and Lola is tougher to see, by design. And right now Lola is too preoccupied with ignoring her own feelings to notice that nobody misses much.
The flashback scenes of Lola and Philip’s courtship, which took place in London, are filmed with darker colours and with more red and orange costumes. Lola is chatty and smiley in them, a major change. By contrast the scenes in Greece have a hazier style, reflecting the heat, and the clothes are almost entirely gray, blue or white. And you can almost feel the silence surrounding Lola. In London she spent a lot of time clomping around with a little recording device to capture the sounds of raindrops, or dogs splashing through puddles, or ambient street noise outside her window. (Ambient sounds as a metaphor for a woman who’s lost her way was also used recently in Zi. Two films don’t quite make a trend, but it’s more than a coincidence.) In both locations we get a sense of Philip’s background and friends, but apart from a habit of presenting raw fish (to be cooked for dinner) wrapped like flowers, we don’t get much of Lola’s. Her connection to her music and her soundscape is the most important thing about her, and Ms. Laird does an excellent job of showing how Lola thinks about sound, but that’s not what this movie is about.
It is becoming an unbearable cliché to show a woman struggling with relationship problems without a support network. Of course it feels very isolating to realise your relationship is, as the content warning before Satisfaction would have it, ‘unhealthy,’ but it’s maddening to see so many movies on this theme surround the men with a vast social network and women not so much. The issues here are not just personal or individual but also societal, and it would have been smarter not to use Elena as a proxy for the whole outside world. Writer-director Alex Burunova clearly has a good understanding of how a problem is more easily addressed when it is named. But the whole point is that Lola’s feelings know that something is wrong. Philip is ignoring that, and Lola is trying to – so why is someone this smart, with this many resources, listening to her partner instead of herself? Why has someone with such good instincts chosen to ignore them? This happens for many reasons of course (whether women have children or not), but here those reasons are externalised into the textures of the world around Lola. It takes far too long for her to make some decisions, and when she does those decisions are not particularly pleasant.
That means the achievements of Satisfaction are largely due to how the music of Midori Hirano, the cinematography of Máté Herbai, and the sound work of Javier Umpierrez manifest Lola’s thoughts. It’s just a shame that the power of these achievements are not matched by everything else onscreen. That said, even though Satisfaction doesn’t deliver on the promise of its title, it is worth seeing to examine how careful and clever design can improve an idea.
Satisfaction recently played at BFI Flare.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
You might also like…
