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What price glory hole

Marianne Faithfull's performance scuttles Irina Palm
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
August 29th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
A hand about the house. Marianne Faithfull is rather shaky as Maggie.
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Irina Palm

Directed by Sam Garbarski
With Marianne Faithfull, Miki Manojlovic, Kevin Bishop, Siobhan Hewlett, Dorka Gryllus and Jenny Agutter

A middle-class widow in a Home Counties village finds herself suddenly desperate for money so her grandson can get proper medical treatment for cancer. The 50-ish Maggie had always been taken care of by her husband, but at his death he left her in debt and a few rungs lower on the village social scale. Having traded the family home for a council flat, Maggie has managed to economize, and generally ignores the polite snubs or, worse, pity from her former friends. But then her beloved grandson falls ill.
With no work background, Maggie is rudely shown the door at employment agencies. She goes up to London daily to respond to help-wanted ads, but gets nowhere. One day as she’s wandering through the neon confines of Soho, she sees a sign in a window advertising for hostesses. That the establishment is named Sexy World doesn’t stop the desolate Maggie from inquiring after the job.
The word “hostess,” like “model,” has a different connotation in Soho. Maggie believes that Sexy World might be seeking someone to staff the cashbox. In reality, the management is looking for someone to work behind a glory hole to anonymously masturbate the male clientele. As Maggie has never worked, Sexy World’s owner, Miki, finds her soft hands perfect for the job. When the reality of what she’s just applied for dawns on her, Maggie prepares to leave in high dudgeon. Then she hears how much money she’d make.
Sam Garbarski’s Irina Palm sounds promising on paper, and the final film does provide some interesting questions about the limits to which people will go to survive. That the film occasionally relies on clichés for its survival is generally forgivable, as the story’s setup is thoroughly intriguing.
Unfortunately, Garbarski’s film fails for its central performance. As Maggie, Marianne Faithfull gives a frustratingly mechanical performance. Every gesture or facial expression from the famed singer is premeditated, if usually arriving a fraction short of suitability. The emotions her character tugs with are never owned by Faithfull, and indeed hang on her like something rented.
The other problem with Faithfull’s performance is that she’s unbelievable as a middle-class Englishwoman — a class that the rock-star member of a minor aristocratic family never had to pass through. Faithfull’s life has been Carnaby Street highs and dosshouse lows, rather than the tea-cozied existence of the British bourgeoisie. Were she as strong and expressive an actor as she is a singer, the situation might have been different.
Without believing in Maggie’s emotional journey, we take neither her victories (if earning the reputation as the surest hand in a Soho joy booth can be taken as an accomplishment) or defeats (her family and erstwhile friends find out) to heart.
It’s a shame, as the rest of the cast is really very strong. As Miki, the Serb actor Miki Manojlovic (a staple of Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljevic’s films) is excellent. That his expertly nuanced performance is met with Faithfull’s absence of subtlety only highlights the squandered potential of this film. Manojlovic’s Miki is, career-wise, a glorified pimp. Yet the actor brings such a wounded humanity to the man (especially when shot under neon, where Manojlovic’s face becomes a field of bruised blues) that Miki becomes wholly sympathetic.
As Maggie’s son and daughter-in-law, Kevin Bishop and Siobhan Hewlett are equally up to their tasks, though Garbarski gives Bishop a bit too slack a leash in the actor’s most dramatic moment. If only Bishop could have found a way of siphoning off some of his outpourings for Faithfull.
As Maggie’s best and (in typical English fashion) cruelest friend, Jenny Agutter is Little England writ large. Her upright, Anglican breeding, and the way she wields the sequined club of the Queen’s tongue, are perfect. When she learns of Maggie’s work, her face becomes a mask of controlled disdain. One can almost hear the cadenced voice of Dame Edith Evans in the scene: “A haaaandjob?”
Agutter is so fine that it seems like a missed opportunity not to have cast her as Maggie, as she could have easily expressed, both physically and vocally, the class minefields that the mysterious hand behind the wall, “Irina Palm,” is forced to traverse.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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