Trance and Danny Boyle - the Master of Mesmerism

Danny Boyle - national hero after his work on the 2012 London Olympics, and perhaps one of of my favourite directors. What I love more than anything about Danny Boyle is that unlike other film-makers (with perhaps the exception of Ang Lee or Steven Spielberg) is that he doesn't confine himself to one genre. Shallow Grave is a world apart from The Beach, which is completely different to Sunshine, which is as far removed from 127 Hours as The Sound of Music is from The Evil Dead! In a recent interview he stated that he likes to take small films and make them feel big - a feat he certainly achieved with his Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire. With a clear passion for film, an awareness of the importance of the story and a good script, combined with a dexterous flair for film-making, Boyle is one of the greats - which is why I was more than a little bit excited when the lights went down for Trance last night.

The premise is a simple one - James McAvoy plays Simon, an art auctioneer with a bad gambling addiction. As a means of wiping off his debts he joins forces with Vincent Cassel's Franck, a small-time gangster with a penchant for finger nail removal. Working with Franck to pull off an inside job - the lifting of a Goya painting worth over £25 million, the plan seems to go well until Cassel opens up the painting to find the canvas is missing - and thanks to a bump on the head, McAvoy now has amnesia! This is where the simplicity ends. After a heavy bout of torture fails to jog Simon's memory, they resolve that the only way to find the missing Goya is for Simon to see a hypnotherapist - enter Rosario Dawson's Elizabeth Lamb, intelligent, provocative, and seemingly with motives of her own. What follows is a mind-bending narrative of twists and turns that cinematically blurs artifice and reality. This creates positives and negatives. Negatively, this could be construed as very confusing. I have to concede, there are parts of the film where the boundaries between what is vision and what is reality are extremely hard to fathom and present the intelligent viewer with the same problem-solving skills as Channing Tatum trying to work out which shoe goes on which foot. Yet despite this highly abstract fusion of artifice and reality, it is Boyle's intention for it to be as such. The viewer is constantly supposed to be working to fathom what is real and what is not - after all the film hinges on hypnotism, and like McAvoy's character we are supposed to be vicariously hypnotised and work out the twists and the turns of the plots with him. This abstract approach from Boyle has trademarks of his cult classic, Trainspotting - which is no bad thing. What the story gives us though is a complex, engaging and highly psychological thriller that is, granted not Boyle's masterpieces, but a British film that shows Boyle to be one of the greats of modern cinema.

The film has a relatively small cast, the crux of the action focusing on the interplay between McAvoy, Dawson and Cassel. McAvoy gives a strong and physically brave performance as Simon who is put through the emotional ringer, as well as the physical one. He handles the range of complex emotions, both the expressed and repressed ones with great conviction, solidifying his status as a leading man both at home and abroad. Cassel gives an equally fine performance as the villainous Franck, playing him with the required charm and bubbling malevolence, whose techniques for extracting information would make any qualified manicurist wince. It's nice to see Rosario Dawson being given a role to flex her performance muscles. More than just the formulaic love interest, her Elizabeth Lamb is a complex character whose motives remain ambiguous throughout the movie. Kudos has to be given for her bravery as well - baring not just her soul but her body (quite graphically so) as well. The role allows Dawson the opportunity to give a strong and nuanced performance.

Overall, in true Boyle fashion, Trance has the desired hypnotic effect. Perhaps overly convoluted at times (something which some critics have highly criticized the film for) this only serves to demonstrate the subject matter - the highly complex world of the human psyche and the dangers that can come about from delving too deep.

It only remains to say that while Trance may not go down as Boyle's masterpiece, the man is still a directorial force to be reckoned with - and with news of a Trainspotting sequel in the works, visiting its characters 20 years later- I think it's safe to say Mr. Boyle and great movie-making have not quite finished with each other.