Few modern bands combine soul, spirit and rage like Florence + the Machine. With such heavy thematic lines running through their music and a very clear religious pulse to each album, what writer/director Vincent Haycock and co-writer Florence Welch --who also stars in the film and, of course, is the namesake of the band -- chose to do with the material from their latest album, "How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful," is really no less surprising than if Of Monsters and Men made a short film for "Beneath the Skin" in the form of a 40-minute puppet show.
Opening on a distant neon cross shining above an unnamed city that I can only assume is Rio de Janeiro, tucked away in the background behind rolling hills and busy highways, Haycock establishes the film's (and the band's) love of symbolism right out of the gate. And with a name taken from Homer, the film isn't exactly working hard to obscure its influences, either.
From there, we join Florence in a car talking with a man, and the tumultuous relationship of the two is externalized in the film's first song, "What Kind of Man." Musically, the film interacts well with the song, finding key moments of breathiness to emphasize its cinematography and using a car crash to jerk the viewer into the electric-guitar-and-drums portion of the song.
But something feels off. For all of the clearly allegorical imagery on display, where a battle against eight or ten men feels instead like Florence battling for her soul, or a dark, dirty cell where Florence lies emphasizes her nakedness and vulnerability, the film feels curiously flat about these images. Florence imbues every scene with the outrageous level of passion characteristic of her live performances, but the scenes feel less like specific, well-crafted metaphors and more like broad strokes. And other numbers feel completely hollow, rather like blank canvases than fleshed-out ideas.
Take "St. Jude," for example, the most straightforwardly religious of the album. The sequence set aside for that song finds Florence once again wandering around with wet hair as she rubs up against various men like a cat to a scratching post. We see shots of starlings flowing through the air like someone watched too much "True Detective," a double of Florence kneeled in front of a cathedral (get used to seeing them around), a bunch of men carrying large rocks, and someone carries Florence, limp, down the street. When you cram too many images and ideas together into a sequence, it breaks the scene. It becomes confusing. And by the time the shamanic man approaches Florence at the conclusion of the song and asks if she's lost, there's no sense of resolution because Haycock's images are hard to follow.
There's a surplus of intent and craft on display here, but it's in the service of thinly sketched metaphors. And on a technical level, every song has something distracting happening on-screen. "Ship to Wreck" has the same distracting double work -- we never see the second Florence's face, I guess we're supposed to know it isn't her -- that shows up in "St. Jude" and "Delilah." The same sexual, repetitive Florence-versus-a-bunch-of-guys choreography rears its head again in "Delilah" and "Third Eye," and some poorly executed stage-fighting ruins the effect of "Queen of Peace." The other numbers range from soulful to confusing, but they all have something going on in front of the camera to distract the viewer from the feeling.
It's good to have purpose, it's good to have meaning, but when your film has only meaning, it can feel like we're watching it from across a chasm with neither good filmmaking nor good writing there to bridge the gap for us.
