Hallam Foe

By all accounts, Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell) is a strange young lad. A loner and a Peeping Tom, Hallam spends half of David Mackenzie’s new film spying on Kate (Sophia Myles), a hotel-worker who looks like his dead mother. He spends the other half seducing her and then somehow manages to remain in her bed even after she has found out. And amongst this adolescent sexual mayhem there is still space for a clumsy copulation with his wicked-witch stepmother (Claire Forlani), and an attempted murder. The life of Hallam Foe is certainly intriguing; although at times it is more interesting for him than for us.

Mackenzie should be lauded for tackling a potentially sticky subject matter with impressive simplicity. Hallam Foe succeeds in debunking the aura of sexual squalor that surrounds the ‘Peeping Tom’. Instead of dark moments enjoyed in darker places, Hallam’s distant voyeurism is shown as a natural extension of adolescent curiosity. So when he crawls around rooftops and steals glimpses through skylights, Mackenzie is careful to have Bell maintain an impish – and not menacing – air. Add to this the disarmingly childlike imagination Hallam uses to sidestep the world’s frightening vicissitudes, and it becomes hard to equate him with any of the perversity we normally invest in Peeping Toms.

That is not to say Hallam Foe sidesteps sex altogether (actually, it’s rather sexy) – nor is it to say that Hallam himself is not sexually troubled. Indeed, he is quite perverse – without the various transformations of his Oedipal Complex there would be no film here to watch at all. But Mackenzie’s film seems to say that he is not, as such, unnatural. In a world where step-mothers naturally want to bed their lovers’ son, and where young attractive women naturally enjoy being looked at, the confused adolescent with a vibrant imagination and a penchant for looking really isn’t all that out of place.

Mackenzie does well to steer clear of both the prudish and the puerile, but there remain problems with his technical language. Stylistically, Hallam Foe is a mess. It is quick to jettison its opening moments of considered landscaping for a barrage of trickery once Hallam moves to Edinburgh. Like its protagonist, the film apparently gets caught up in the bright lights of the city – and is not well served by the ensuing headrush. Ill-considered montages butt against each other and jam our experience of the film, whilst a ubiquitous soundtrack skips whimsically from genre to genre. We are left with the impression that Mackenzie has left his iPod on shuffle once too often.

In the end, Hallam Foe presents us with a well-constructed narrative that paints child-like imagination and sexual neurosis as close bed-partners, before then trying to debunk both the ‘child-like’ and ‘neurotic’ tags they are lumbered with. It does so through direction that is at times imaginative, at times weird, and at times ineffective – just like its eponymous hero really.