Lost in London review: Woody Harrelson breaks boundaries with supercharged Allen-esque live film
20 January 2017 • 10:26am
D irector: Woody Harrelson. Cast: Woody Harrelson, Owen Wilson, Willie Nelson, Eleanor Matsuura, Martin McCann. 100 mins
Lost in London is a one-off live feature film, broadcast to cinemas internationally just as it was being shot on the streets of our capital, and not only that, but a film consisting of a single uninterrupted take.
The brainchild of writer-director-star Woody Harrelson. it was an experimental tightrope-walk, supercharged throughout with the possibility of failure. Of course, any live performance, in any medium, risks the same thing, with fluffed lines, dropped props, or a lighting malfunction. But the danger of a deal-breaking logistical disaster felt all the more intense with audiences glued to this around the world.
It went alright on the night, with no hideous glitches, for Harrelson’s 100-minute recreation of a shambolic episode he personally endured in 2002, while starring in the West End play On an Average Day. (“Too much of this is trueâ€, a caption ruefully clarified at the start.) Opening in decidedly Birdman-esque fashion with an apathetic curtain call, and ending on Waterloo Bridge an hour and a half later, with the National Theatre’s illuminated scroll visible in the background, it was a knowing dalliance between stage and film – like a promenade performance caught on the fly.
'Lost in London' film rehearsals Credit: Alex MacNaughton
H arrelson, playing himself, was all over the papers as it starts, caught in a papped sex romp he’s desperate to conceal from his wife Laura (an especially terrific Eleanor Matsuura). The script airs this dirty laundry uninhibitedly: when she finds out, she leaves him in disgust to a night of A-list hobnobbing he’s too guilty to be in the mood for. Mishaps and bad life decisions only mount up.
Breaking new ground with this live experiment was only a matter of time, and single-take gambits of its ilk have been dabbled in for years. Had the technology allowed him back in 2000, Mike Figgis would surely have shown his brilliant, split-screen Timecode this way. Harrelson acknowledges his debt to the mesmeric German thriller Victoria, with its similar sense of urban emergency.
Eleanor Matsuura plays Laura, Harrelson's wife
W hat sticks out, though, is the comedy. There’s a running gag about Woody being mistaken for his namesake, Woody Allen, which feels very apt, as his script is exceedingly Allen-esque. Amid insights on celebrity, narcissism and staying faithful, there are Hollywood in-jokes that bring the house down. It peaks with a 10-minute self-portrait from an also-in-town Owen Wilson, offering crisis advice with vanity slathered all over it. Reduced to trading insults about each other’s films (“You were out-acted by a dog in Marley and Me!â€), both stars rose to this one-off occasion delightfully.
Harrelson might have tweaked his story to preserve a real-time structure – it’s jarring when we wind up in a police cell pretending hours have elapsed. And the film lurches to a halt more with relief that it’s crossed the finish line than with anything you’d call an elegant climax.
Who knows what it’ll look like down the line as a record of its own premiere – the live-streaming may well have been its oxygen. But we did watch the boundaries crumble outright between live performance and real, on-the-hoof film-making, to amply entertaining effect.