The title of Arnaud
Desplechin’s Playing ‘In the Company of Men’ announces the most obvious
of the film’s strange layerings: it’s an adaptation of Edward Bond’s play of
that name which is also to some degree a record of the adaptation, with the
actors seen working out and discussing scenes in the rehearsal room. That
device is used more sparsely than one might expect though, and since few viewers
will have any knowledge of the underlying play, it’s difficult to fully gauge
its significance. Early on, it appears that Desplechin intends it to add a
layer of playful illumination to the somewhat dark and claustrophobic text,
best exemplified by a midway acknowledgment that Bond’s play lacks any female
characters, “solved” in the film by importing Ophelia from Hamlet for
the purpose of a few grafted-on scenes; it’s also notable that the film’s most fully-realized
passages, in conventional terms, are flashbacks, depicting a character’s accounts
of time spent serving on a submarine. But any resulting sense of an “opening
out” is counterweighed by a core narrative that if anything becomes more interiorized
and quasi-impressionistic as it goes along, leaping over several major decisions
and actions, culminating in a dramatic action which barely seems “justified” in
conventional terms by anything that preceded it (the plot turns on some major
corporate scheming and deal-making, almost all of which is presented here as a
matter of briskly intense discussions between a few people at a time). Any
sense of abstracted remove (also inherent in the core familial relationships,
between a father, an adopted son and heir, and a servant who comments that he
also perceives himself as a kind of son) is again offset though by a couple of
startlingly visceral moments, both involving intimate and potentially repulsive
engagement with the blood of others, and as such countering what might be seen
as the figuratively relatively “bloodless” presentation elsewhere. Ultimately,
the film is as slyly enveloping as Desplechin’s best, evoking an unusually
knotty blend of reactions and aftertastes.
