Michael Winterbottom - I Want You (1998) Review

Michael Winterbottom is one of the most interesting British filmmakers of the past 30 years, even though he doesn't really get the respect he deserves. Nevertheless, his films are full of the creative invention one can be amazed.

Here are several examples.

• 24 Hour Party People is the pitch-perfect music scene biopic that meticulously mixes fact and fiction to generate the authentic vibe of the times it depicts. 
• On the other hand, A Cock and Bull Story, his adaptation of Lawrence Stern's Tristram Shandy. It adopts the storytelling techniques of the source material to create yet another narrative layer about the film crew making a film adaptation. 
• There are also 9 Songs - a near-abstract exploration of an intimate relationship combined with a bunch of fancam concert recordings that coincidentally provide a contextual commentary over what is going on in-between. 

And then there is I Want You.

Due to a variety of reasons, it is one of the lesser-seen films in Winterbottom's body of work. This film was made right after Winterbottom made his breakthrough with Jude and Welcome to Sarajevo, and yet I Want You suffered from distribution issues, which made the film hard to come by.

I Want You is a brooding, expressionist melodrama built upon the conventions of the neo-noir genre. It is a story of two people trying but unable to move on. A young man Martin is coming back after a stint in jail and trying to get his life back together. He was involved in a horrible crime, but now it is behind him. OR so it seems. And then there is a young woman named Helen. She and Martin were previously in a relationship. But now she seems to have moved on only to be haunted by her past once again. OR so it seems.

On the surface, it seems like a pretty standard kitchen sink melodrama full of pondering and rumination and a little bit of reflection here and there. But it turns out to be something else. For the lack of the better word, the film camouflages itself as a brooding melodrama while there is this dark backward roiling over. Here is where Neo-Noir thing kicks in. Subversion is one of the great things about the Neo-Noir film genre. By design, neo-noir film does things differently, and that allows them to move beyond the conventions and explore different kinds of narratives within a recognizable template.

That what I Want You does. It is a master class in misdirection and subversion. The term that best describes what this film does is "sleight of hand." You have a surface plot going on, and it never seems to be a ruse, because it is not. It is just interpreted differently due to a lack of cohesive context. We get bits and pieces of context along the way, and it fits together well. Except, there is more to it. The dramatic action gradually escalates to the boiling point, and upon reaching the climax, everything comes into place, except it is different. The puzzle that was coming together until then turned out to be something else.

Here's what is going on. Martin is a broken man, riddled with guilt and in search of closure. He doesn't really know where he is going and what he is going to do. All he has left are festering ruins of a relationship he tries to cauterize. On the other hand, Helen is deeply traumatized by her experience with Martin. She is a victim, a survivor. While she is trying to maintain a semblance of a normal life, she is unable to have a proper relationship with other men. So, for the most part, she just tries to trudge along with life from day to day.

The film establishes this narrative and reinforces it each time Martin and Helen bump into each other.

Martin is not supposed to see Helen. That would violate the terms of his parole, and he would go back to jail. But for reasons of unresolved feelings, he still tries to reconnect with her. Every time they meet - it is an awkward and odd dead end. Martin tries to come forward, but Helen rejects his attempts. Time after time, he tries to talk; she doesn't want to. Even after he saves her from being raped. Martin is depicted as an obsessive stalker. But it is more than meets the eye.

It is then revealed that Helen's reaction is such that Martin had killed her father back in the day. So her reactions are reasonable in this context. And Martin seems to acknowledge that. He just wants to get over it and move on. And so things are kind of settled. Eventually, they have sex to get closure, and that's it. Martin is moving away to the other town, Helen seems to move on with the other relationship. The story's done.

That's where the kitchen sink drama would stop. Everything's wrapped up. But it is not. Martin comes back one more time to set things straight.

But if the conflict is exhausted, there is no real tension left - why this whole thing still goes on? If Martin accepts what he had done and moves on if Helen is over it - why the narrative just resets and starts the last beat all over again? Is it going to amp up the melodrama part to wrap things up the hard way? Why bother with such an overwrought ending? It doesn't make much sense at the moment because it is so predictable. But it is more than meets the eye.

And that disorienting disquieting annoyance of obviousness is by design. Martin is unable to move on, and so he comes to sort things out. Because Helen just wants to get rid of Martin once and for all, she seems to act with preventive aggression. Her line of thinking - give him what he wants and get over it. She coerces Martin into forcing himself on her only to be stopped by the boy who also happened to be in the house.

That's where neo-noir subversion kicks into high gear.

Martin reveals that Helen actually killed her father, and Martin took the hit for her only to get a cold shoulder afterward. Helen bludgeons him in retaliation. With the boy's help, she disposes of the body just like she did with Martin years ago.

It is the plot twist that doesn't really function as a plot twist because while it adds new information to the story, it doesn't change anything.

The revelation shifts the dynamics of the story. Martin was the complicit victim all along, and he tried to cope with it. Helen becomes a much more proactive character in retrospect. We don't know who Helen's father was - so there is a question whether Helen's family was dysfunctional. Judging by Helen's tendency to disobey what other men want her to do - we can assume that her father was a controlling one, and she strived for independence. We can assume that murder was probably not premeditated and committed on impulse.

In other words, Helen replaced her supposed victimhood of the dysfunctional family with the other victimhood by committing a murder and feeling the guilt over avoiding retribution. The murder got her a certain level of independence and rendered her unable to enjoy it fully. With that baggage, she naturally wanted to pretend all of that was in the past. Martin threw a wrench in that, and so the story repeated itself.

It is a grand narrative trick. On the one hand, it recontextualizes the story. At the same time, it doesn't discard anything that happened before reveal - it just adds another dimension to the story that significantly expands the characters and their motivations. It shows how destructive such actions can be.

And that's something worth admiring.