Shadow Dancer
This suspenseful yarn, about a young woman’s betrayal of the people she holds most dear, translates elegantly from the page to the screen under the aegis of Academy Award-winning director James Marsh (Man on Wire).
The movie takes no political positions. With an icy detachment, it peers through the fog of war and examines the slippery military intelligence on both sides to portray a world steeped in secrecy, deception and paranoia.
“Shadow Dancer” is ominously subdued and grimly taciturn. The dialogue is minimal. Only what has to be said is said, and the tone of most of it is one of quiet urgency. Except for a red jacket that Collette wears, everything is photographed in shades of gray. Characters are glimpsed through reflecting glass, curtained windows and half-opened doors.
Ms. Riseborough’s gripping performance is remarkable for its stillness. Even at the most stressful moments, Collette never loses her composure, except in one desperate moment with Mac, when her bottled-up emotion escapes like a scalding burst of steam from a pressure cooker. Soon enough, she dons her mask of sphinxlike calm.
Something in this gloomy conspiracy thriller set in 1990s Belfast reminded me of an exchange between Ivor Claire and Guy Crouchback, in Evelyn Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen. Ivor asks Guy what he would do if challenged to a duel. Guy replies: "Laugh", but Ivor responds thoughtfully: "One hundred and fifty years ago, we would have to fight if challenged. Now we'd laugh. There must have been a time when it was rather an awkward question." In the 1970s, an IRA man knew it was his duty to attack the British with every violent means, but in 2012, with Martin McGuinness shaking hands with the Queen, the idea is laughable. In 1993, the era of the Downing Street declaration and the Good Friday agreement, republican footsoldiers found themselves confronted with Ivor Claire's "awkward question".
For some reason, Colette wears a vivid red shiny-looking coat, which makes her look more like a strippergram than an undercover agent. Surely she should be wearing something less conspicuous? And the last act and the final reveal, in which the murky conspiracy is brought to light, doesn't deliver quite the hard narrative punch I was hoping for.
Riseborough's performance is certainly very good, though, and another demonstration of her technique, intelligence and versatility: she is so good at suggesting thoughts and emotions that surface slowly and gradually. And the movie is very good at showing the sheer misery of the time. In one republican pub, a tense notice says: "Singing Not Allowed." Nothing shows the mood of national depression and fear more clearly than that.
The acting is excellent, especially the central performance of Andrea Riseborough, who manages to express Colette's doubts and anxieties while retaining a core of moral mystery. There is a mortifying final revelation towards which the film's title enigmatically points. But nothing is quite as good as the film's opening sequences, and the movie is a little too dogged in avoiding substantive politics.
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