‘Trance’ is less movie, more mind trip

MANILA, Philippines – Englishman Danny Boyle can pretty much do anything at this point. Having won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars in 2009 for “Slumdog Millionaire,” following a succession of movies that have been fascinating if not always fully entertaining, he has gone on to make the near one-man-show that was 2010’s “127 Hours” and orchestrated the much-yakked-about opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

That “liberating” thought should help explain the existence of his latest film, “Trance,” a psychological thriller that engages one’s (unbelieving) mind as much as it does one’s (distracted) eyes. 

It is at its core a heist film, technically the latest such venture for French star Vincent Cassel, who had also played a dapper thief in “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Ocean’s Thirteen.” Yet, with Scotsman James McAvoy as an art auctioneer and American Rosario Dawson as a hypnotherapist rounding out its lead triumvirate, “Trance” is ultimately not just a standard-issue heist film, instead going for broke as a post-neo-noir caper that is not just a whodunit but a forehead-slapping whoreallydunit. 

Those who will come into a “Trance”-showing theater anticipating a fresh but largely unsurprising diversion (that means you, “Iron Man 3”) could end up dissatisfied. 

Working on a decade-old script by Joe Ahearne that needed doctoring by writer John Hodge, Boyle aims to put “Trance” viewers themselves into a trance. His latest flick is less an old-fashioned storytelling venture and more of a newfangled indulgence that takes the audience, as the film’s production notes puts it, into the “enticing [yet] unreliable world of the subconscious.” 

As such, people have compared “Trance” to director Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” itself a mindbender that diffused its central tale into layers of intellectual whimsy. Yet for all its mind-boggling implausibility and deliberate obfuscation, “Inception” did lead somewhere, its conclusion tidier than “Trance’s.” 

Boyle’s newest is, to this viewer, more comparable to “12 Monkeys,” director Terry Gilliam’s 1995 sci-fi film that not only had its own not-what-they-seem lead triumvirate (played by Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and, in arguably his best gig yet, Brad Pitt) but was also a hazy, non-linear doozy — a polarizing pleasure that suggested, in cinematic terms, that the journey is more important than the destination.

Viewers could debate that “Trance” has in fact a thin narrative, with excellent Boyle cohorts such as cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, production designer Mark Tildesley, editor Jon Harris, and music supervisor Rick Smith (of the electro duo Underworld) making up for the lack of story with sensory immersion. This they do via duplicity-suggesting mirror images, tilted, distrust-hinting camera angles, shadiness-masking bright colors, and pulsating melodies to make the brain dance. 

Yet in sum, you do not watch “Trance” so much as you float through it.

For those who dislike movies without storytelling safety nets, “Trance” would come off as a disappointing, or at least head-scratching, trick.

But for those who dig films that can free viewers from the shackles of Hollywood convention, “Trance” can be quite the mind-opening, even mind-blowing, treat. – Rappler.com 

‘Trance’ opens on May 1 across the Philippines. It is rated R-16 — due to some violence and nudity — without cuts by the MTRCB