Islands

17/10/2026

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Indifferent Landscapes

It might be unfair to invoke Antonioni in the context of Islands, but this small film nevertheless shares three features with the great Italian director’s work: the importance of filmed space, a character in crisis, and an ambiguity at its centre. The space is the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries, and though the film is in the plural, it is this island the film focuses upon. The character in crisis is Tom (Sam Riley), a gifted tennis player, and now a coach at a hotel, whose career ended with an injury, but who was good enough to win a game against Nadal. It has been the talk of the island for years, a moment Tom plays down when someone brings it up, but probably plays on when he calls in favours. He is clearly a local legend and no matter how often he screws up, and how much he screws around, people are forgiving. Tom possesses an easy charm within a complicated character, and Riley reckoned, “No one can play a washed-up, self-destructive 40-something as well as me.'’ (The Big Issue) It is the sort of comment Tom might make – both self-deprecating and self-aggrandising at once. It is the province of the person who might not like himself, though aware that others indeed do. The modesty is genuine. Yet it isn’t likely to be affirmed, as others will recognise charm, while the one making the remark will see self-defeat. Tom is clearly a social success and a personal failure, someone others wish to be around, though Tom himself would probably prefer not to be in his own company. Yet the film never quite locates his crisis, as though the injury might have left him without purpose, but has also given him an excuse not to confront any other reason why his life seems a mess.

This leads into a greater ambiguity that the film offers as something close to a twist. Tom starts training a young boy, Anton, hanging out with him and his parents. The boy has a tennis gift his father doesn’t share, and while the chemistry between Tom and Anton’s mother, Anne (Stacy Martin), suggests lust at first sight, there may be a further complicity between them, one that remains moot. In a scene at the police station after Anne’s husband goes missing, she reveals that she and Dave have been trying to conceive a second child and that the problem has been Dave’s, leading Tom to wonder if Anton really is his son. Though Anne offers the information because the officer wants some answers, the camera focuses neither on Anne nor the detective any longer, as it hones in on Tom. Is he the father of the boy we may wonder, but the film never cares to resolve this question; instead allowing it to become a revelation not of plot, but of character. Sure, Anne might have lived a racy life before and has been to the islands, and sure Tom appears to have slept with many women and probably often when so drunk he wouldn’t be able to recall names or faces. As Tom Charity astutely notes, ‘‘there are so many scenes of him stirring from an inelegant slumber that this can properly be described as a motif.’’ (Sight and Sound)

While the film could have been simply about regret and loss as Tom mopes around Fuerteventura mulling over lost opportunities, the film hinges on an opportunity he may have found but cannot ascertain. It isn’t impossible that Tom is the boy’s father, but it would be a long shot: Dave may still be the boy’s father; yet, even if he isn’t, Anne acknowledges being wild a few years earlier, and there is no clear indication Tom and Anne have slept together. If the film stated that Tom was the boy’s father, it ought to have worked harder to make this more plausibly the case. Some, looking at the film negatively, could insist that the film remains ambiguous because the unequivocal would fall into the implausible. In such a claim, the film isn’t subtle but lazy, a half-assed thriller too weakly plotted to offer proper resolution. Worse, the film pulls not just one punch but two. The husband is found safely, as Carmen Paddock reckons, ‘unfortunately, the central mystery of Islands does not pay off’.’ And since we never find out if Tom is Anton’s father: “this trouble-in-paradise tale loses steam when it should crescendo to devastating revelations.’’ (The Skinny)

But can narrative damp squibs allow for more nuanced revelations? If many are talking up the excellence of Riley’s performance, with the Evening Standard saying, ‘‘Sam Riley sizzles in this scorching, sun-frazzled Hitchcockian delight’’, it rests on the film’s retreat from narrative progress into characterisational self-questioning. The more the story fails, the better it can potentially reveal Tom’s sense of failure. A more plotted film might show him played by Anne, who, looking for a way out of her marriage, murders her husband and pins it on Tom. The film plays with these possibilities in invoking Hitchcock, while also being bewitched by the triangular possibilities of noir (with the added complication of the boy). Paddock might believe the film teases us with generic elements to draw us in, only to retreat from their delivery, but it seems more that the noirish aspects are used as affect instead of effect. Rather than allowing the tropes to play out as they are initially played up, director Jan-Ole Gerster starts to play them down, anti-climactically shifting the register from dramatic development to thematic exploration. While a concentration on plot would be more concerned with Anne’s motives (a film noir femme fatale), instead Islands becomes more interested in Tom’s, and hence from effect to affect. Why has he become so entangled with this family that he ends up consistently letting others on the island down, or asking favours from them when others might wonder why? He fails to turn up for tennis lessons after promising the local police officer he will give the man’s daughter classes after a gentle quid pro quo when he is stopped for speeding, and asks for favours from a receptionist at the hotel who probably has a thing for Tom (or had a fling with him),  and who may wonder why he is doing so much for a woman who might have murdered her husband. It looks like he is going to ruin at the very least his fraternal capital, the friendliness of the locals who can see he is a lost soul, but at least believes he has one. But has he sold it to be with an Englishwoman passing through? Again, we can think of affects as the film captures well a sense of community in the faces and feelings of others who feel the impact of Tom’s apparent wilful determination to ruin his life.

That Anne turns out to be no femme fatale, that her husband somehow found his way to another island and is discovered alive, not much worse for wear, means there is no case. But it does bring out Tom’s sense of need. It isn’t impossible Anton is his son, but what matters more from the film’s perspective is that Tom may have a desire for a family that he hasn’t previous acknowledged, and that he has one within the wider community. But his role in it has been more as son than father, a person constantly helped out and bailed out by indulgent locals who feel great affection towards him. By the end of the film, that community is no longer really there. He may have pushed his luck once too often with those constantly doing him favours, and a couple who own a camel business have shut up shop and moved elsewhere: a couple to whom Tom has been very attached. Before the end of the film, he is sitting in his apartment eating cereal – the box he bought for Anton, as he briefly played dad, and that the boy never got round to eating as Anne, Dave and Anton return to England. The next shot shows him at the airport, with no luggage, determined to get on a plane.

If the fall guy in noir is stupid, or at least deemed dumbed down enough by desire to be manipulated by the femme fatale, in Islands Tom is instead absurd, closer to an existential figure who needs to find meaning, over a noir character who needs to try and work out the plot before he is caught in its machinations, often failing and thus falling. Nothing from Anne’s perspective has changed, as the film offers deliberate circularity in the images: near the beginning, Anne gets off the bus with her husband and son, with Tom noticing them in the background. Near the end, Tom is again in the foreground of the shot and the family get on the bus in the rear of it. Their life will presumably continue with petty squabbles and irritations, but it is Tom’s life that has been altered, no matter the absence of any material difference to it. The fall guy is usually in no doubt that his life has been impacted: the men in Double Indemnity or Body Heat end up dying or incarcerated. Their material circumstances have certainly changed.

Instead, Islands is interested in false assumptions that in both instances stall the plot and redirect it. The first is that Dave is dead and possibly murdered. The second rests on Tom assuming that he can now become a father years after he may have conceived a child, and enter into a family relationship with Anne and Anton. This is ridiculous, partly because even if it would make sense casually that if the first assumption were true, it might follow that the second assumption would be possible, would it work emotionally? If Dave has been murdered by Anne, it might be a sign that she loves Tom. But it would also show her to be ruthless and Tom’s burgeoning vulnerability, as he wants more from life than solitude and shagging, boozing and snorting, wouldn’t be countered. If anything, it would be exacerbated. Who wants to be in a family that has ousted one of its members on violent terms? Even if Dave hadn’t been killed by Anne but drowned while drunk, this would still leave Anne and Anton dealing with the loss of a husband, and what Anton would assume is his father, and certainly the death of the man who has brought him up. Tom slipping neatly into that role so soon after Dave’s death would surely leave him wondering how capable of emotion they might be. It would require us to accept the psychology of the worst of films or the most provocative of works, of a film that shrugs its shoulders and says that Dave was an irritant and an idiot (which he is) and Anne and Anton would be better without him, or a work that proposes from a strict point of view when someone dies doesn’t it make sense that another fits into that role, and that there need be no great feeling of loss?

The great film on this question is Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, with a man happily married with two kids who starts an affair with another woman and claims he loves both women. When the wife dies in a lake, he continues his life with the mistress and the kids as though nothing much has happened. One may interpret the film in numerous ways, but the basic narrative suggests that life goes on; only the permutations change. To get stuck in guilt and grief would be useless naval-gazing when you can have a no less pretty replacement, where the kids will still have a mother, and the problem of worrying over trying to be in two places at once has been resolved. Everybody is happy, except the woman who is dead. This may not quite be what Varda is saying, but that is nevertheless the bare bones of the story she tells. Yet Le Bonheur feels absurd, and so do Tom’s expectations here. Gerster doesn’t follow through narratively as Varda does, but, if he did, he would arrive at a similar place. Instead, he retreats from that provocation and, rather than the film being ridiculous, as Varda’s so deliberately is, Tom’s feelings happen to be. What was he thinking, we might wonder.

The answer would be he wasn’t really thinking; he was feeling, yet on a profound level, as though he saw in Anne and Anton his salvation. This means no more than a man with a few regrets who, never making it at tennis because of an injury, has lived without much purpose for years. He wakes late, takes a swig from a bottle of spirits before a training session and often isn’t there on time. He is both unreliable and reliant on others; hardly a combination that will do wonders for his self-esteem, especially as he wouldn’t wish to fuck anybody over, even if it may sometimes happen because he is likely to fuck up. And at a certain point the verb becomes a noun: he fucks up and becomes a fuck up. Tom may not be especially given to foul language, but we might believe that he is trying to hide a few foul, self-critical thoughts behind that exhausted-looking visage of his. Anne may just be his rocky road to redemption on an island known for its volcanic formations. His naive belief that Anne and Anton represent his future gives us an idea of what a mess he made of his past. He needs to redeem his life, and Gerster proposes he does so with a woman who might not be a scheming temptress, up there with Phyllis Dietrichson and Matty Walker, but she possesses an air of callous self-preservation and indifference to others that certainly leaves people on the island wondering why he is so invested in this woman’s predicament.

It returns us to that question of weak plotting that can, at a certain point, be eschewed all the better to reveal strong characterisation. Were the film to follow through on its noirish plot and insist that Anne killed her husband and Tom was the fall guy (after all, he was hanging out with Dave just as he was last seen), this would be a poor version of a James M. Cain story. But by using the plot as a reflection of Tom’s interior crisis, Gerster allows the film to reveal it without any need for voiceover, flashback, or backstory rumination. When Riley says nobody can play a washed-up forty-something as he can, this wouldn’t seem to be an autobiographical confession.  Riley appears to have in life exactly what Tom wants: he is married to actress Alexandra Maria Lara, whom he met while starring as Ian Curtis in his breakthrough film Control, and they have a son around Anton’s age. However, Riley has a face just gently lined enough, and a capacity for watchful anxiety evident enough, to register the character’s fretful feelings of failure without feeling obliged to draw upon any personal history. While it isn’t the case that cinema acting is physiognomical over psychological, the former is vital and the latter useful. Not all film actors draw on the Method, but enough have drawn on personal experience, on affective memory, from pasts recent or distant, to make it a vital aspect of modern film. Yet physiognomy trumps ‘Method-ology’ when what matters is a lived-in face over a lived experience, and Riley’s coppery countenance, his tanned tiredness, captures well a man who is young enough to contain innocence in his aspect, without his face looking so lived in that no future is available to it. When he looks at Anne and plays with Anton, we see a possible destiny that needn’t feel snuffed out. Another actor might propose it has been, or has an appearance that doesn’t look like it contains regret in the first place. Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Ryan Gosling are very different actors, but they would be examples of miscasting here physiognomically. They are part of Riley’s generation, yet their faces lack this sense of anxiety, of a life draining away that the features can register.

By turning away from the story, the film can turn towards the actor, and without relying on those elements we invoked (flashback, voiceover and back story) reveal the crisis that his life happens to be. As Riley says, ‘‘I was fascinated by this man, the idea of a life full of untapped possibilities and potential – and the self-destruction that comes with it because of his missteps.’’ (The ArtsDesk) But it can also turn towards the landscape, which can be subtly different from attending to the mise en scene. In this, it can seem to turn the noir image inside out. While noir often takes place in urban settings on the West Coast, where interiors are usually more important than exteriors, and where locations are less valued than studio interiors that play on the genre’s expressionist-inflected tropes, Islands uses Fuerteventura more for its indifference than its scenic intensification. Antonioni understood how locale could generate this indifference, and partly why a critic looking to understand the symbolism in the director’s work would be missing the point. While Hollywood cinema often brilliantly used studio settings to capture a mise en scene that would convey what was on somebody's mind, or the confusion of it, Antonioni proposed that he could use locations to create a gap between character and place, no matter the apparent symbolism in Red Desert, where the greyness of the streets and the fruit seller, and even the fruit he sells, might be seen as registering the perceptual crisis of the film’s female central character.

Yet even here, this is very far away from the type of mise en scene the characters in Gaslight, Rebecca, and The Spiral Staircase are entangled within. When people propose a location becomes a character in their film, this can mean either it is a reflection of that character or becomes detached from them, representing their state or simply a locational reality they find themselves in. While occasionally a filmmaker can give to their locations an adjectival form (the Antonioniesque, the Tarkovskian or the Godardian), this is rarely to reflect character. It is to reveal a vision, a way of using found realities to emphasise a perceptual world far greater than the character’s own sensibility. John Orr may have said, drawing on two 1964 films, Marnie and Red Desert, that ‘‘neither film is naturalistic’’, and that ‘‘the landscape is expressive’’ as he says the ‘‘shot seems to express the point-of-view of the disturbed subject yet does not operate primarily through the POV shot. The subject is framed within the landscape, not separately from it.’’ (Contemporary Cinema) Yet, of course, as Orr notes, there is an enormous difference between Hitchcock’s use of back projection and matte effect, and Antonioni painting the fruit grey and using rich colours for the factory. We would expect the fruit to be richly coloured and the factory to be grey, and thus Antonioni seeks a felt strangeness, while Hitchcock wants a hyperbolic correlation with his title character’s state. Hitchcock is still working in the studio model of character expressivity; Antonioni offers an indifference that found locations lend to the material, and that the director simply makes odder. Anybody who insists too strenuously on character subjectivity in Red Desert risks reiterating a stylistic claim that may hold for classic Hollywood, but no longer became a plausible option when location shooting became so prominent. Certainly, in the 1980s, many films moved back into the studio (One From the Heart, Rumblefish, Streets of Fire, Hammet, The Moon in the Gutter), and they were closer to Hitchcock’s Marnie than Antonioni’s Red Desert, but our point is that location usually contains an element of indifference, one that doesn’t augment character but defies it.

A good example is the film’s opening shots, which could have come out of another Antonioni film, The Passenger. As Tom awakens in the desert, the director may have us wondering what he happens to be doing there. But it would be impoverishing to propose the desert symbolises his state of mind. It would be to undermine the presence of the locale and turn it into the substance of a person’s thoughts. If Antonioni’s work is so great, it rests on everything having a substance that cannot be reduced to a symbol and that, if anything, his work doesn’t elevate spaces to subjectivity, but reduces the subject to a substance in space. If we think the opening shots in Islands resemble Antonioni, it rests on Gerster’s insistence that the character is seen within the landscape and not that the landscape reflecting the character. Gerster says, ‘‘At first sight, the island to me was like volcanic landscapes and like rotten hotels, but the more I discovered the more I understood the cinematic value of the landscape. I started to feel the urge to make a movie there.’’ (Cinema Perspective) He may add that while visiting the island on holiday, he was on his balcony, and a tennis coach served hundreds of balls over the net, and this character intrigued him. Yet such intrigue came out of the island as readily as the character, and whether it is the opening two shots showing Tom small within the frame, or the montage sequence showing various tourists at the hotel swimming pool, the film suggests that the story doesn’t just take place here; it is a place from which the story comes. Halfway through the film, Gerster cuts to a series of empty shots, showing the hotel at night, the pool empty and the bar closed. The last of the five hints at a volcanic movement as the glasses in the bar shake, but nothing comes of it. This isn’t the dramatic moment of terror; it is the quiet anxiety of living in a volcanic environment. Even when Gerster and his cameraman Juan C. Sarmiento Grisales move the camera as a plot function, it conveys a sense of place greater than its narrative role. We see it when the camera tilts and pans at the rocks as an item of Dave’s clothing is found, and the camera movement continues as Anne acknowledges it is her husband’s. Yet we are as much in the rockiness of the landscape as we are in the item of clothing that leads us and the police to infer that Dave may have drowned.  This hardly makes it an Antonioni film (and of course inferences are central to Hitchcock’s). But it contains enough of the Italian director’s quizzical relationship with environment to show what happens when you plant what might seem a typical neo-noir into a particular place, and then bring out various ambiguities in the story, all the better

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Islands

Indifferent Landscapes

It might be unfair to invoke Antonioni in the context of Islands, but this small film nevertheless shares three features with the great Italian director’s work: the importance of filmed space, a character in crisis, and an ambiguity at its centre. The space is the island of Fuerteventura in the Canaries, and though the film is in the plural, it is this island the film focuses upon. The character in crisis is Tom (Sam Riley), a gifted tennis player, and now a coach at a hotel, whose career ended with an injury, but who was good enough to win a game against Nadal. It has been the talk of the island for years, a moment Tom plays down when someone brings it up, but probably plays on when he calls in favours. He is clearly a local legend and no matter how often he screws up, and how much he screws around, people are forgiving. Tom possesses an easy charm within a complicated character, and Riley reckoned, “No one can play a washed-up, self-destructive 40-something as well as me.'’ (The Big Issue) It is the sort of comment Tom might make – both self-deprecating and self-aggrandising at once. It is the province of the person who might not like himself, though aware that others indeed do. The modesty is genuine. Yet it isn’t likely to be affirmed, as others will recognise charm, while the one making the remark will see self-defeat. Tom is clearly a social success and a personal failure, someone others wish to be around, though Tom himself would probably prefer not to be in his own company. Yet the film never quite locates his crisis, as though the injury might have left him without purpose, but has also given him an excuse not to confront any other reason why his life seems a mess.

This leads into a greater ambiguity that the film offers as something close to a twist. Tom starts training a young boy, Anton, hanging out with him and his parents. The boy has a tennis gift his father doesn’t share, and while the chemistry between Tom and Anton’s mother, Anne (Stacy Martin), suggests lust at first sight, there may be a further complicity between them, one that remains moot. In a scene at the police station after Anne’s husband goes missing, she reveals that she and Dave have been trying to conceive a second child and that the problem has been Dave’s, leading Tom to wonder if Anton really is his son. Though Anne offers the information because the officer wants some answers, the camera focuses neither on Anne nor the detective any longer, as it hones in on Tom. Is he the father of the boy we may wonder, but the film never cares to resolve this question; instead allowing it to become a revelation not of plot, but of character. Sure, Anne might have lived a racy life before and has been to the islands, and sure Tom appears to have slept with many women and probably often when so drunk he wouldn’t be able to recall names or faces. As Tom Charity astutely notes, ‘‘there are so many scenes of him stirring from an inelegant slumber that this can properly be described as a motif.’’ (Sight and Sound)

While the film could have been simply about regret and loss as Tom mopes around Fuerteventura mulling over lost opportunities, the film hinges on an opportunity he may have found but cannot ascertain. It isn’t impossible that Tom is the boy’s father, but it would be a long shot: Dave may still be the boy’s father; yet, even if he isn’t, Anne acknowledges being wild a few years earlier, and there is no clear indication Tom and Anne have slept together. If the film stated that Tom was the boy’s father, it ought to have worked harder to make this more plausibly the case. Some, looking at the film negatively, could insist that the film remains ambiguous because the unequivocal would fall into the implausible. In such a claim, the film isn’t subtle but lazy, a half-assed thriller too weakly plotted to offer proper resolution. Worse, the film pulls not just one punch but two. The husband is found safely, as Carmen Paddock reckons, ‘unfortunately, the central mystery of Islands does not pay off’.’ And since we never find out if Tom is Anton’s father: “this trouble-in-paradise tale loses steam when it should crescendo to devastating revelations.’’ (The Skinny)

But can narrative damp squibs allow for more nuanced revelations? If many are talking up the excellence of Riley’s performance, with the Evening Standard saying, ‘‘Sam Riley sizzles in this scorching, sun-frazzled Hitchcockian delight’’, it rests on the film’s retreat from narrative progress into characterisational self-questioning. The more the story fails, the better it can potentially reveal Tom’s sense of failure. A more plotted film might show him played by Anne, who, looking for a way out of her marriage, murders her husband and pins it on Tom. The film plays with these possibilities in invoking Hitchcock, while also being bewitched by the triangular possibilities of noir (with the added complication of the boy). Paddock might believe the film teases us with generic elements to draw us in, only to retreat from their delivery, but it seems more that the noirish aspects are used as affect instead of effect. Rather than allowing the tropes to play out as they are initially played up, director Jan-Ole Gerster starts to play them down, anti-climactically shifting the register from dramatic development to thematic exploration. While a concentration on plot would be more concerned with Anne’s motives (a film noir femme fatale), instead Islands becomes more interested in Tom’s, and hence from effect to affect. Why has he become so entangled with this family that he ends up consistently letting others on the island down, or asking favours from them when others might wonder why? He fails to turn up for tennis lessons after promising the local police officer he will give the man’s daughter classes after a gentle quid pro quo when he is stopped for speeding, and asks for favours from a receptionist at the hotel who probably has a thing for Tom (or had a fling with him),  and who may wonder why he is doing so much for a woman who might have murdered her husband. It looks like he is going to ruin at the very least his fraternal capital, the friendliness of the locals who can see he is a lost soul, but at least believes he has one. But has he sold it to be with an Englishwoman passing through? Again, we can think of affects as the film captures well a sense of community in the faces and feelings of others who feel the impact of Tom’s apparent wilful determination to ruin his life.

That Anne turns out to be no femme fatale, that her husband somehow found his way to another island and is discovered alive, not much worse for wear, means there is no case. But it does bring out Tom’s sense of need. It isn’t impossible Anton is his son, but what matters more from the film’s perspective is that Tom may have a desire for a family that he hasn’t previous acknowledged, and that he has one within the wider community. But his role in it has been more as son than father, a person constantly helped out and bailed out by indulgent locals who feel great affection towards him. By the end of the film, that community is no longer really there. He may have pushed his luck once too often with those constantly doing him favours, and a couple who own a camel business have shut up shop and moved elsewhere: a couple to whom Tom has been very attached. Before the end of the film, he is sitting in his apartment eating cereal – the box he bought for Anton, as he briefly played dad, and that the boy never got round to eating as Anne, Dave and Anton return to England. The next shot shows him at the airport, with no luggage, determined to get on a plane.

If the fall guy in noir is stupid, or at least deemed dumbed down enough by desire to be manipulated by the femme fatale, in Islands Tom is instead absurd, closer to an existential figure who needs to find meaning, over a noir character who needs to try and work out the plot before he is caught in its machinations, often failing and thus falling. Nothing from Anne’s perspective has changed, as the film offers deliberate circularity in the images: near the beginning, Anne gets off the bus with her husband and son, with Tom noticing them in the background. Near the end, Tom is again in the foreground of the shot and the family get on the bus in the rear of it. Their life will presumably continue with petty squabbles and irritations, but it is Tom’s life that has been altered, no matter the absence of any material difference to it. The fall guy is usually in no doubt that his life has been impacted: the men in Double Indemnity or Body Heat end up dying or incarcerated. Their material circumstances have certainly changed.

Instead, Islands is interested in false assumptions that in both instances stall the plot and redirect it. The first is that Dave is dead and possibly murdered. The second rests on Tom assuming that he can now become a father years after he may have conceived a child, and enter into a family relationship with Anne and Anton. This is ridiculous, partly because even if it would make sense casually that if the first assumption were true, it might follow that the second assumption would be possible, would it work emotionally? If Dave has been murdered by Anne, it might be a sign that she loves Tom. But it would also show her to be ruthless and Tom’s burgeoning vulnerability, as he wants more from life than solitude and shagging, boozing and snorting, wouldn’t be countered. If anything, it would be exacerbated. Who wants to be in a family that has ousted one of its members on violent terms? Even if Dave hadn’t been killed by Anne but drowned while drunk, this would still leave Anne and Anton dealing with the loss of a husband, and what Anton would assume is his father, and certainly the death of the man who has brought him up. Tom slipping neatly into that role so soon after Dave’s death would surely leave him wondering how capable of emotion they might be. It would require us to accept the psychology of the worst of films or the most provocative of works, of a film that shrugs its shoulders and says that Dave was an irritant and an idiot (which he is) and Anne and Anton would be better without him, or a work that proposes from a strict point of view when someone dies doesn’t it make sense that another fits into that role, and that there need be no great feeling of loss?

The great film on this question is Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur, with a man happily married with two kids who starts an affair with another woman and claims he loves both women. When the wife dies in a lake, he continues his life with the mistress and the kids as though nothing much has happened. One may interpret the film in numerous ways, but the basic narrative suggests that life goes on; only the permutations change. To get stuck in guilt and grief would be useless naval-gazing when you can have a no less pretty replacement, where the kids will still have a mother, and the problem of worrying over trying to be in two places at once has been resolved. Everybody is happy, except the woman who is dead. This may not quite be what Varda is saying, but that is nevertheless the bare bones of the story she tells. Yet Le Bonheur feels absurd, and so do Tom’s expectations here. Gerster doesn’t follow through narratively as Varda does, but, if he did, he would arrive at a similar place. Instead, he retreats from that provocation and, rather than the film being ridiculous, as Varda’s so deliberately is, Tom’s feelings happen to be. What was he thinking, we might wonder.

The answer would be he wasn’t really thinking; he was feeling, yet on a profound level, as though he saw in Anne and Anton his salvation. This means no more than a man with a few regrets who, never making it at tennis because of an injury, has lived without much purpose for years. He wakes late, takes a swig from a bottle of spirits before a training session and often isn’t there on time. He is both unreliable and reliant on others; hardly a combination that will do wonders for his self-esteem, especially as he wouldn’t wish to fuck anybody over, even if it may sometimes happen because he is likely to fuck up. And at a certain point the verb becomes a noun: he fucks up and becomes a fuck up. Tom may not be especially given to foul language, but we might believe that he is trying to hide a few foul, self-critical thoughts behind that exhausted-looking visage of his. Anne may just be his rocky road to redemption on an island known for its volcanic formations. His naive belief that Anne and Anton represent his future gives us an idea of what a mess he made of his past. He needs to redeem his life, and Gerster proposes he does so with a woman who might not be a scheming temptress, up there with Phyllis Dietrichson and Matty Walker, but she possesses an air of callous self-preservation and indifference to others that certainly leaves people on the island wondering why he is so invested in this woman’s predicament.

It returns us to that question of weak plotting that can, at a certain point, be eschewed all the better to reveal strong characterisation. Were the film to follow through on its noirish plot and insist that Anne killed her husband and Tom was the fall guy (after all, he was hanging out with Dave just as he was last seen), this would be a poor version of a James M. Cain story. But by using the plot as a reflection of Tom’s interior crisis, Gerster allows the film to reveal it without any need for voiceover, flashback, or backstory rumination. When Riley says nobody can play a washed-up forty-something as he can, this wouldn’t seem to be an autobiographical confession.  Riley appears to have in life exactly what Tom wants: he is married to actress Alexandra Maria Lara, whom he met while starring as Ian Curtis in his breakthrough film Control, and they have a son around Anton’s age. However, Riley has a face just gently lined enough, and a capacity for watchful anxiety evident enough, to register the character’s fretful feelings of failure without feeling obliged to draw upon any personal history. While it isn’t the case that cinema acting is physiognomical over psychological, the former is vital and the latter useful. Not all film actors draw on the Method, but enough have drawn on personal experience, on affective memory, from pasts recent or distant, to make it a vital aspect of modern film. Yet physiognomy trumps ‘Method-ology’ when what matters is a lived-in face over a lived experience, and Riley’s coppery countenance, his tanned tiredness, captures well a man who is young enough to contain innocence in his aspect, without his face looking so lived in that no future is available to it. When he looks at Anne and plays with Anton, we see a possible destiny that needn’t feel snuffed out. Another actor might propose it has been, or has an appearance that doesn’t look like it contains regret in the first place. Both Leonardo DiCaprio and Ryan Gosling are very different actors, but they would be examples of miscasting here physiognomically. They are part of Riley’s generation, yet their faces lack this sense of anxiety, of a life draining away that the features can register.

By turning away from the story, the film can turn towards the actor, and without relying on those elements we invoked (flashback, voiceover and back story) reveal the crisis that his life happens to be. As Riley says, ‘‘I was fascinated by this man, the idea of a life full of untapped possibilities and potential – and the self-destruction that comes with it because of his missteps.’’ (The ArtsDesk) But it can also turn towards the landscape, which can be subtly different from attending to the mise en scene. In this, it can seem to turn the noir image inside out. While noir often takes place in urban settings on the West Coast, where interiors are usually more important than exteriors, and where locations are less valued than studio interiors that play on the genre’s expressionist-inflected tropes, Islands uses Fuerteventura more for its indifference than its scenic intensification. Antonioni understood how locale could generate this indifference, and partly why a critic looking to understand the symbolism in the director’s work would be missing the point. While Hollywood cinema often brilliantly used studio settings to capture a mise en scene that would convey what was on somebody's mind, or the confusion of it, Antonioni proposed that he could use locations to create a gap between character and place, no matter the apparent symbolism in Red Desert, where the greyness of the streets and the fruit seller, and even the fruit he sells, might be seen as registering the perceptual crisis of the film’s female central character.

Yet even here, this is very far away from the type of mise en scene the characters in Gaslight, Rebecca, and The Spiral Staircase are entangled within. When people propose a location becomes a character in their film, this can mean either it is a reflection of that character or becomes detached from them, representing their state or simply a locational reality they find themselves in. While occasionally a filmmaker can give to their locations an adjectival form (the Antonioniesque, the Tarkovskian or the Godardian), this is rarely to reflect character. It is to reveal a vision, a way of using found realities to emphasise a perceptual world far greater than the character’s own sensibility. John Orr may have said, drawing on two 1964 films, Marnie and Red Desert, that ‘‘neither film is naturalistic’’, and that ‘‘the landscape is expressive’’ as he says the ‘‘shot seems to express the point-of-view of the disturbed subject yet does not operate primarily through the POV shot. The subject is framed within the landscape, not separately from it.’’ (Contemporary Cinema) Yet, of course, as Orr notes, there is an enormous difference between Hitchcock’s use of back projection and matte effect, and Antonioni painting the fruit grey and using rich colours for the factory. We would expect the fruit to be richly coloured and the factory to be grey, and thus Antonioni seeks a felt strangeness, while Hitchcock wants a hyperbolic correlation with his title character’s state. Hitchcock is still working in the studio model of character expressivity; Antonioni offers an indifference that found locations lend to the material, and that the director simply makes odder. Anybody who insists too strenuously on character subjectivity in Red Desert risks reiterating a stylistic claim that may hold for classic Hollywood, but no longer became a plausible option when location shooting became so prominent. Certainly, in the 1980s, many films moved back into the studio (One From the Heart, Rumblefish, Streets of Fire, Hammet, The Moon in the Gutter), and they were closer to Hitchcock’s Marnie than Antonioni’s Red Desert, but our point is that location usually contains an element of indifference, one that doesn’t augment character but defies it.

A good example is the film’s opening shots, which could have come out of another Antonioni film, The Passenger. As Tom awakens in the desert, the director may have us wondering what he happens to be doing there. But it would be impoverishing to propose the desert symbolises his state of mind. It would be to undermine the presence of the locale and turn it into the substance of a person’s thoughts. If Antonioni’s work is so great, it rests on everything having a substance that cannot be reduced to a symbol and that, if anything, his work doesn’t elevate spaces to subjectivity, but reduces the subject to a substance in space. If we think the opening shots in Islands resemble Antonioni, it rests on Gerster’s insistence that the character is seen within the landscape and not that the landscape reflecting the character. Gerster says, ‘‘At first sight, the island to me was like volcanic landscapes and like rotten hotels, but the more I discovered the more I understood the cinematic value of the landscape. I started to feel the urge to make a movie there.’’ (Cinema Perspective) He may add that while visiting the island on holiday, he was on his balcony, and a tennis coach served hundreds of balls over the net, and this character intrigued him. Yet such intrigue came out of the island as readily as the character, and whether it is the opening two shots showing Tom small within the frame, or the montage sequence showing various tourists at the hotel swimming pool, the film suggests that the story doesn’t just take place here; it is a place from which the story comes. Halfway through the film, Gerster cuts to a series of empty shots, showing the hotel at night, the pool empty and the bar closed. The last of the five hints at a volcanic movement as the glasses in the bar shake, but nothing comes of it. This isn’t the dramatic moment of terror; it is the quiet anxiety of living in a volcanic environment. Even when Gerster and his cameraman Juan C. Sarmiento Grisales move the camera as a plot function, it conveys a sense of place greater than its narrative role. We see it when the camera tilts and pans at the rocks as an item of Dave’s clothing is found, and the camera movement continues as Anne acknowledges it is her husband’s. Yet we are as much in the rockiness of the landscape as we are in the item of clothing that leads us and the police to infer that Dave may have drowned.  This hardly makes it an Antonioni film (and of course inferences are central to Hitchcock’s). But it contains enough of the Italian director’s quizzical relationship with environment to show what happens when you plant what might seem a typical neo-noir into a particular place, and then bring out various ambiguities in the story, all the better


© Tony McKibbin