Losing Yourself: A Review of 'Franklyn'

'It's not you it's me' - Franklyn depicts four very different world views, all of them fantastical and embellished in their own way.

A little over an hour into Franklyn, things start to becomes clearer, if not entirely make sense; strands which seemed disparate unexpectedly link up, and earlier events which seemed disconnected turn out to have everything in the world to do with each other. It’s a rewarding moment, the pieces of the puzzle falling into place, but it also carries with it the whiff of screenwriter contrivance: in the world which has been presented to us, it seems a far more honest conclusion would involve those links remaining tantalisingly out of reach.

The four story-strands themselves are all interesting in their own right: a father looking for his lost son, a suicidal college student trying to communicate to herself, a yuppie having a jab of nostalgia after being ditched at the altar, and a masked vigilante in a strange metropolis of religious zeal and towering church spires called Meanwhile City.

The latter is certainly the most immediately arresting, gothic visual clutter lifted from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil mixing with what seems like a semi-parody of Wachowski vigilantism. Ryan Phillippe also manages to sketch deeper insight into his character than the bizarre facial accessory and ornate production design around him would seem to allow.

It is part of the success of Franklyn that this nether-world becomes less captivating in comparison with the other, seemingly more mundane stories the more they are all fleshed out. Eva Green’s frustratingly egocentric Emilia becomes increasingly sympathetic despite the odds being stacked against her, before Bernard Hill’s seemingly dead-end story evolves into a quiet tragedy all of its own. It’s a shame, then, that Mark Riley’s pining romantic never quite convinces, his part in the dramatic crux of the film edging too close to mawkish astrological pre-ordainment.

The director describes the film as a ‘modern fairytale for cynical times,’ and it certainly carries a hard edge to it. Dealing with abandoned, abused, and psychologically unhinged individuals, it is successful for the most part in pulling an audience into four different visions of the world, all of them seriously skewed and – in their own way – shockingly self-involved. Whilst the conclusion suggests that such egocentrism can be all too obliquely solved by external agents of unknown origin, Franklyn nonetheless deals with some compelling themes and, if not transcends then certainly side-steps being overly derivative.