HOME MADE
Joanna Hogg’s gorgeously-composed movie Exhibition introduces us to a middle-aged bohemian couple, both artists, whose names we never learn. They have lived and worked in a modern house in London for eighteen years, and now they are selling it. He is a sculptor, and sits in a small studio on the third floor designing an installation with AutoCAD. She is a performance artist, and sits in a spacious studio on the second floor, trying to make herself into Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy. He and she communicate, mostly, through the intercom.
He wants to sell the house and move on. He comes and goes from it freely: he takes road trips, and walks through the neighborhood at night. She would like to stay. She is connected to the house in a primal, animalistic way; she will not let go of it. She naps on the long window sill in the bedroom, sits alone under the table in the living room, embraces a boulder in the garden. In one of the movie’s loveliest passages, she lies on her side in the hall and folds herself around a corner. The house’s skin has become her own. She’s constantly peering through the venetian blinds in her studio to see what’s happening on the street below. (She wears shirts with horizontal stripes, as if she’s embedded in these blinds.) She reveals herself most deeply to her husband from this window, when, dressed as St. Teresa, she pulls up the blinds and dances as he watches from the sidewalk below.
The house remains something of a mystery. The camera stays still for long stretches, and reveals only one bit of it at a time: one corner of a room, one floor of a facade, one panel of a sliding door, one run of spiral stair. The layout is never made entirely clear. It’s only at the end, at a farewell party the couple give for friends, when we see a cake that’s been modeled after the house, that we understand its organization. At this point, as he and she cut into it, breaking apart its sugar walls, the fantasy of the architecture, and of their marriage, is coming undone. What seemed uncluttered and modern, seamless and perfectly structured, is not.