Film Review: Daphne
Daphne is a snapshot in the life of a highly intelligent, comically misanthropic, 31 year old woman who is in many ways an embodiment of the myth of the 60s, but who in 2017 just doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. Daphne’s fervour for Slavoj Zizek and Run DMC set her squarely in the ‘kooky girl’ trope, but she is no Jess Day, she’s darker and she’s realer. Daphne gets drunk at lunch, makes cancer jokes and uses her intellectual rigour as a pretense for disregarding love as a sickness and a capitalist tool.
Through a series a humanising moments, in addition to Emily Beecham’s fantastic performance, it becomes clear that Daphne’s behaviour is an unhealthy coping mechanism resulting from a deep self loathing. Although not obvious at first, a moment of extreme violence turns out to be the film’s turning point. A witness to the act, Daphne becomes increasingly incapable of suppressing everything that’s going on inside. Required to attend counselling, she faces a choice between self-destruction or learning to love herself, just a little.
The film’s premise is very similar to that of Fleabag, the BBC comedy created by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Also set in London, Fleabag (the character’s name) tries to deal with the trauma of her best friend’s suicide. She is brash, vulgar and uses sex and humour to distance herself from those around her, thereby punishing herself. Yet, despite the similar subject matter, Daphne and Fleabag differ significantly in their emphases. Whereas Fleabag is concerned with understanding its central character, with fourth wall breaking monologues and a heartbreaking revelation generating empathy and bringing resolution, Daphne is remains largely unknowable.
Although there are moments which threaten to peel back Daphne’s self-protecting layers, at no point do we even get close to understanding why Daphne is the way she is. Even her counselling session entails her asking to sit in silence. A fleeting allusion to a missed invitation feels significant but the film makes clear that the why is not important. Daphne is not a character to know, she is a character to observe.
The effect is that Daphne feels authentic. There is no dramatic revelation and no emotional panacea because life doesn’t work that way. As brilliant as Fleabag is, people don’t just let you into their world. Life is the product of lots of little changes and only when you look back on them, do they look pretty big. In this way Daphne is beautifully understated. The film’s ending is open, but not infuriating. It brings resolution to a particular moment in Daphne’s life, demonstrating the very subtle transformation she has undergone. Yet never is that transformation overstated, Daphne paints life’s struggles as an ebb and flow in a way that is both touching and refreshing, if not entirely satisfying.
However, the draw back of Daphne’s aloofness is that, but for a few moments it is difficult to connect with her emotionally. As such, while the film is at times profound, for large stretches it leaves you unsure how to engage with Daphne both as a character and as a film. This uncertainty is reflected in the difficulty of determining what kind of film Daphne is. The film’s hyper-realism and truly touching moments of drama combined with Beecham’s brilliantly comic performance, replete with highly quotable drunken blatherings, mean Daphne resides somewhere in between dramatic-comedy and comic-drama.
Further proving the difficulty in pinning down Daphne, one review paints the film as ‘a romantic comedy with all the bullshit taken out’. Yet despite threatening to be a rom-com, with David the bouncer playing a very modern Prince Charming, romantic love is never presented as the answer and neither is a man. Indeed, Daphne is a woman very much in control. Men exist around her as largely lecherous and pitiful beings and Daphne gets what she wants from them. She uses sex to self destruct but she is never not the agent of her own destruction. Most comically, at one point she orders a man she has picked up at a bar to go and wait for her outside while she finishes her drink.
Ultimately this is a film about agency. Daphne is spiralling, but she is in control of that spiral. More importantly, she has the power to turn her life around if she is prepared to stop hiding from the pain that increasingly threatens to consume her. The question at the heart of the film is whether she will choose to. There is a lot to like about Daphne and in many ways it is a beautiful film, with eye catching colour bringing vibracy to almost every shot. Furthermore, Emily Beecham’s performance is exceptional, bringing depth to a character who is never made truly knowable to the audience. Ultimately though, it is that aloofness which makes Daphne so difficult to connect with and which holds it back. Yet despite that, the film’s understated authenticity is both powerful and prescient in a very quiet, subtle way.
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