Nightingale

Elliott Lester’s film, which was made under the aegis of Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company, is a probably a film buff's film  It is a virtual one-man show smartly written by Frederick Mensch and powerfully acted by David Oyelowo who impressed recently in the very different role of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.

Oyelowo plays Peter Snowden, a lonely gay war veteran who lives at home with his controlling mother and is obsessed with a married army buddy whom he has invited to dinner. The film depicts his mental unraveling as he waits for his imaginary friend's impending visit.

Mensch and Lester make crafty use of phones and a laptop video camera to expand the dramatic limitations of one man in a couple of rooms (tellingly created by production designer Richard Lassalle) setting up different points of view and “off-stage” characters against which Peter’s rapid mental deterioration takes place.

We watch as firstly Peter is transported by the promise of the new life that the removal of his mother has made seem possible then as it gradually becomes clear that his situation is anything but normal,  his ability to hold his fantasy together fractures into rage and self-recrimination.

Whilst enjoyable as a formal exercise and a performative workout, Nightingale (the meaning of the title is not clear) is above all a portrait of estrangement, of an individual but also of a society in which connectedness is increasingly of a purely virtual kind. The film is no Psycho-style twitchfest but a poignant depiction of emotional isolation and a crushing sense of personal inadequacy.  It is sad but one feels, like Carol Morley's 2011 documentary, Dreams Of A Life, all too true.

 

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