REVIEW: The Price Of Bones

- By Allan Lear

The other day I was hanging around in the middle of a group of people, just to remind myself what a hell life was before we could restrict all our socialising to the online arena. Amongst the various no-marks and flumps who made up the crowd was one peculiar gentleman who was recruiting for his men’s group. This group, he explained, was a way for fellows to get together one day a week, do something manly like paint a shed or belch, and discuss the intractable dilemma that is the crisis of modern masculinity. Where do we, as manly northern men, stand in today’s fluidly metrosexual postfeminist ethos?

This person, I need hardly say, is an idiot. There is no crisis of modern masculinity. In many ways, there has never been a better time to be man: there’s no conscription any more, foreigners do all the manual labour, and we’re allowed to read comics in public. Stop your whining and put your feet up. Get a roomba or a woman to do the hoovering. I joke, of course, but it’s the sort of joke that comes in through the window of a crisis centre wrapped in half a brick.

I’ve gone on record before as saying that privilege is not an issue that affects me, because all my gangs won. I’m straight, white – or, more importantly, white in a white-dominated country and culture – and male. And cis, although I wouldn’t have known to add that until quite recently. Four gangs, four wins. And while we can all plainly see the advantages in terms of a quiet life that come with being straight and white (and cis if, unlike me, you know what that means), it’s easy to forget that being female is still often no picnic even in our enlightened and liberal Western European utopias. Did you know that the UK is ranked eightieth in the world for equality of pay between the sexes? Not eighth, or eighteenth. Eightieth. Can you NAME eighty countries? I can name twelve, and one of them is R’lyeh.

My wife, like every woman you have ever met and ever will, is on a diet. We were talking earlier today about dieting and anorexia nervosa, and how anorexia is prevalent in teenage girls not only because they are impressionable but also because it’s about the exercise of control in an otherwise powerless existence. We also mentioned that it ties in to the psychological issue of body dysmorphia which is, essentially, a mental condition in which the image of your body that you hold in your mind doesn’t match the condition of your body as it looks in the mirror. Anorexics tend to see themselves as heavier than they really are; some people may hold parts of their body to be horrible or peculiar in ways only they can see, and this leads to other problems like plastic surgery addiction or even self-mutilation.

Psychopathology, to someone like me who considers the human race a collection of seven billion people in various states of more-or-less undiagnosed mental aberration, is fascinating in its own right. In the areas where the morbid psychological tendency abuts against the physiological realm, truly bizarre and sometimes even wonderful things happen; one only has to glance into the science behind the placebo effect, for instance, or psychosomatic illness, to see some very peculiar and counterintuitive results indeed.

So I was very interested to get hold of The Price of Bones, a short film from Hollow Tree Films, which purports to be an exploration of the increasingly dangerous lengths young women will go to in order to achieve their idea of the perfect body – that ideal being, in this particular instance, the body of an undernourished six year old boy.

The two young women in question are Heather (Jordan Anton) and Caprice (the spectacularly-named Summerisa Bell Stevens). We open with Caprice and the trivia of her daily existence; her bedroom, a shrine to the discipline and endeavour of attempted weightlessness; her spiky and argumentative relationship with her frumpish mother, played with oh-crap-is-it-my-line clumsiness by Lisa Dennett; her inexplicably missing father, whose absence from the scene is regrettably never explained; her meals, piled up uneaten in the fridge.

The only respite from this tedious existence is the time she spends with her mate Heather, with whom she shares an obsessive need to lose weight. Whatever effective chemistry the mother / daughter relationship lacks, we can place the blame firmly with the cack-handed staff-assertiveness-training-day roleplay Dennett dumps onscreen, because the relationship between Heather and Caprice is as gorgeously layered and complex a double-act as one is likely to find within the constraints of a ten-minute short. The two actresses deliver a nuanced partnership that hints at solidarity, secrecy, jealousy, complicity, competition, love and folie à deux between our two protagonists.

As the shared world of the duo’s co-dependent delusion shoves them ever faster down a spiral of tragedy, they hit on an ultimate get-thin-quick scheme that inevitably has mixed results.

Unfortunately, perhaps due to the short runtime, the ideas that are in play don’t really get room to breathe. I was irked by the fact that the missing father plotline is never resolved, and if it’s supposed to represent some notion that an absence of paternal influence is partly to blame for anorexic developmental tendencies, then paradoxically it’s not afforded enough screen time to seem like a sufficient weight on Caprice’s psyche. The name “Caprice” is an odd choice for an obsessive, as well; her insane drive to lose weight is hardly what one would call whimsical, and if this is a deliberate irony then it’s one that’s at odds with the rest of the film’s straightforward message delivery.

Similarly, while I appreciate that the “final solution” to the weight loss problem is an analogy for the constraining roles with which young women damage each other in a way that is certainly as widespread and profound as the invidious body fascism they encounter outside their own peer-group and demographic, I couldn’t help feeling that the narrative drive of the story had been sacrificed to the needs of the metaphor at this point. Rather than working on both levels, as a social satire and as a horror story, The Price of Bones allows the horror plot to peter out instead of building to the unpleasant sting ending that it appears to have been trying for.

This short is an intellectually ambitious project with two superb acting performances at its heart but ironically, in order to work as a film as well as a statement, it needed a little more meat on its bones.

- By Allan Lear