Butterfly Kiss
First screened in the late 1990s / Most recently screened in August 2024
Director: Michael Winterbottom. Cast: Saskia Reeves, Amanda Plummer, Des McAleer, Freda Dowie, Fine Time Fontayne, Paul Bown, Emily Aston, Ricky Tomlinson, Kathy Jamieson, Lisa Riley, Paula Tilbrook, Katy Murphy. Screenplay: Frank Cottrell Boyce. In Brief:
Weak Reeves, sensationalist concept ought to hurt worse, but Winterbottom well sustains so many forms of tension.
VOR:③
Some of the serial-killer stuff is stale, but several images aren't at all. Curious intro to Winterbottom style, McGarvey lensing.
Is it confidence or arrogance or narrow imagination that sends so many prospective first-time filmmakers into financiers' and producers' offices with a script about three or four or six 20somethings trying to seriocomically figure out life in the very city or town where the writer-director came of age? I mean, write what you know, audiences love this template, all kinds of actors call sell it, etc. I get it. But in the absence of instantly recognizable once-in-a-generation talent, why guarantee the sensible, skeptical follow-up question about what you will bring to this genre that innumerable others haven't? When you could walk into those offices saying, "There's a crazy lady who keeps haranguing petrol station attendants in northern England, looking for someone called 'Judith' who may be real or imagined, family or foe. When these baffled employees turn out not to be Judith, she murders them, except one who's so mousy and sweet and maaaayyybe closeted that she goes home with that one instead. That's where our unhinged stranger disrobes with sexual intent, and reveals the meters-long latticework of chainlink and sharp-edged scrap metal she wears underneath her clothes, either as BDSM practice or Catholic moritfcation or both. From there, we're off and racing into queer Bonnie and Clyde, with a mounting body count and a backdrop ethnography of rural dispossession, all of it possibly climaxing in a religious sacrifice. By the way, I can manage all this in 88 minutes for just £400,000. You down?"
I mean, I know which meeting I'd rather be in, on either side. And Honeybunny-era Amanda Plummer, never abashed about a flagrantly confronting character concept, an ideal balance of marketable name and actorly skill and affordable price-point, sure saw an opportunity to take a big creative risk. And Butterfly Kiss, as conceived and as executed, attracted some worthy attention from its unsurprisingly small release, going as far as the main Berlin competition, showcasing what debut cinematographer Seamus McGarvey could do even with cheap equipment and a scraggly landscape, and launching first-time feature auteur Michael Winterbottom into a generically versatile, unusually prolific, mini-major career for a more-than-solid decade+, even if he's mostly just been the Trip guy for about the last 15 years.
Butterfly Kiss is not always as strong or seductive as its script or its pitch meetings must have been. The whole serial killer thing, while fresher than "five snappy Manhattanites figure out life and love," is itself a little overplayed and boxes the script into a few tricky corners. Saskia Reeves, in the manifestly drabber part of the fascinated milquetoast who rides along for Plummer's lethal rampage, never deduces how to make the character compelling. You especially wish a more incisive, exploratory actor were handling her straight-to-camera interviews diffused across the film, a too-feeble feint at the kind of psychic onion-peeling that Jane Fonda famously managed in Klute. To his detriment, Winterbottom seems least inspired in passages that can't help but call attention to themselves. The dialogue exchange that glosses the movie's title seems concocted just for that purpose, and neither resonates nor convinces. The scene where Plummer's Eunice finally offers a motive for all her mayhem must have leapt off the pages of Frank Cottrell Boyce's script, and it both lifts and shifts the stakes of the narrative and it's key characterization... but Winterbottom has placed it in such a sterile location and shot it so indifferently that this crucial pivot becomes a blink-and-you-miss-it marginal note.
Consistently with his then-nascent career as an interesting poet of unsettled environments, Winterbottom shows a much defter hand with the general terrain of Butterfly Kiss, affective and geographical, than with some of its turning points. A devoted mixologist of scripted scenarios and documentary techniques, he and McGarvey and editor Trevor Waite and a gallery of unfamous actors, maybe professional and maybe not, bring impressive tension to Eunice and Miriam's circuitous prowl across Cumbria. If you liked the sequences in Under the Skin that dropped Scarlett Johansson incognito into quotidian spaces, generating a dangerous charge between the extraordinary monad and the everyday surround, you might dig the baseline format and tone of Butterfly Kiss. A number of different tensions flourish in the protagonists' encounters with the men, women, and children who mostly do but occasionally don't become their victims.
Though they never again collaborated, McGarvey manages to blend his own characteristic vividness with lighting and texture into Winterbottom's often grubbier aesthetic. Like Bible verses, or in the vein of a Flannery O'Connor yarn or PJ Harvey murder ballad, Butterfly Kiss's images often have one foot in the mundane and another in the parabolic, both of which are welcome rebuttals to how so many directors shoot serial killings as if the occasion demands a kind of surgical sleekness in a world with no spiritual register. And whatever opportunities they've blown at earlier junctures, Winterbottom and McGarvey very much generate the ending they need, which wasn't the one I saw coming—even though I'd watched the movie before! Grade:B–
