I watched this as part of the online Sundance film festival. That's coloring my perspective on this. In a way, Bad Behaviour is the ideal Sundance movie. Sundance is a high-profile film festival yet it's for independent films, often from new or emerging filmmakers. There are, of course, films that come right out of Sundance as fully-formed hits. CODA won Best Picture just last year out of Sundance. More often though, Sundance movies feel like Short Stories. They feel incomplete almost. Like a filmmaker had 80% of an idea for a movie and just decided to make it as is. The films get modest budgets and can attract name actors, but the bigger the star, the more it feels like they are doing this because they had a hole in their schedule.
Bad Behaviour is the debut feature from Alice Englert as writer and director. She put together a pretty strong cast for this, including herself, Jennifer Connelly, and Ben Wishaw. The film is very watchable. There are a lot of great performances. Englert is strikingly at ease on screen despite the many hats she's wearing. Connelly gets a showy performance. And Wishaw gets too be a little cooky. The film had my attention early on as it told separate stories of Lucy (Connelly) and her daughter Dylan (Englert). Lucy is a somewhat needy mother, calling Dylan more often than she'd like, even as Lucy is at an enlightenment retreat. At the retreat, Lucy, an actress who peaked as a teen, keeps finding her occasional breakthroughs ruined by a young model (Dasha Nekrasova) who has the world bending to her. Meanwhile, Dylan begins an on-set relationship with one of the stars of the movie. Both Lucy and Dylan's situations fall apart in spectacular fashion in back-to-back scenes in the middle of the movie that jolted me out of any complacency. Full props to Englert for her bubbling tension early on and payoff with those scenes.
After that mid-peak, the movie does sputter to an end. It brings the mother and daughter together to have them hash out their problems, but that doesn't amount to much. Only a couple days later I'm struggling to remember how the movie even ends. By the end, the main thing holding my interest was figuring out if Englert was trying to say anything about her own relationship with her famous mother. Englert's mother, after all, is Oscar winner Jane Campion. Fair or not, it got hard for me not to read into any conversation between Dylan and Lucy through that lens.
Taken on its own, Bad Behaviour feels incomplete. It's an idea that couldn't quite fill a movie. However, as an early showcase of what Englert brings as a director, it's pretty exciting. Englert shows real talent in bringing the material to life. She gets a nicely unhinged performance from Connelly who seems starved for interesting material. Even if this movie didn't blow me away, it makes me curious for what Englert might make next.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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