LIFE DURING WARTIME UK DVD Review

'An acquired taste' doesn't quite cover it with Todd Solondz's work, and Life During Wartime is no exception. A follow-up of sorts to 1999's Happiness, the director returns to the dysfunctional lives of three sisters, examining how their various intersecting relationships have and continue to affect each of them. Joy (Shirley Henderson) is contending with both visits from a deceased lover, and her current husband's troubling compulsion. Trish (Allison Janney) is dating a new and unlikely man (Michael Lerner), whilst her husband (Ciaran Hinds) is fresh out of prison and heading home to see his son. Helen (Ally Sheedy) meanwhile is battling with Hollywood and her appalling insensitivity to those around her.

This being a Todd Solondz film, there's a wholly synthetic air about everything, with extremely measured dialogue and exchanges conducted with near inhuman precision. The characters are glaring constructs, and whilst they never convince as anyone you'd actually come across, they do work within this hyper-real aesthetic.

Thankfully Solondz manages to avoid the neck-wringingly painful navel-gazing that the likes of Noah Baumbach revel in, by way of his delightfully wicked sense of humour. When Trish openly (and thoroughly inappropriately) tells her son she got 'wet' during a date it's vulgar and wince-making, yet wonderfully comic. Coming across as a vicious sideswipe at parent-child convention and romanticised notions about the 'loss of innocence' it has more in common with John Waters than Baumbach. A moment of incredibly acute satire has the son of Trish's new lover articulate, straight faced, the nature of his dead-end existence, and then how it's irrelevant as China will take over the world anyway. Odd moments of predictability are tempered by others that admirably buck the clichés, as Solondz examines some typically dark areas with relish.

There's a certain cruelty to the director's satire and it's hard to care all that much for even the most unfortunate of his specimens. That said, as a more abstract look into emotional truths it's a remarkably perceptive work that, whilst lacking the bite of Happiness, remains a distinct and witty entertainment.

 Life During Wartime is out on UK R2 DVD from 12th July 2010 through Artificial Eye.