performance of a lifetime

A friend of mine bumped into Danny Houston in the street in London and thanked him for this perfomance. I feel like she sort of did it on my behalf too, and that so many people have not had the privilege of being aware of it.

The full sense of the film doesn't really kick in until Ivan Beckman discovers he has cancer and the total void of anything redeeming in his Hollywood agent life becomes blindingly apparrent. He's sitting by his pool trying to take it in, and from then on, his struggle straddles two lives.

This is where the acting comes in, and while being about Hollywood, this film is certainly not a Hollywood type film. Houston knows that less is more, and there are no stunt twitches or mawkish attempts to manipulate the audience.

The fate of this man who sold his sold to the devil in the name of success is a comment on the nature of cancer itself. He perishes because he chooses material ambitions over self-realisation, and his unexpressed energy turns on him and eats him away.

The classical music soundtrack is beautiful, its blend with the photography giving the film a strange beauty its human lowlife don't deserve.

He dies clutching at the breast of a nurse he doesn't even know, and one is left with the impression that life had just been downhill for him, from the moment he was weaned from his mother's scented breast and entered a world of empty dreams.