Thomas Hardiman's Medusa Deluxe is now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries—including the United Kingdom, India, Turkey, Brazil, and Mexico—from August 4, 2023, in the series Debuts.
Medusa Deluxe (Thomas Hardiman, 2023).
In the midst of navigating the drama that ensnares all of Medusa Deluxe’s characters, Claire Perkins’s Cleve looks at a fellow hairdresser and explains, “There is some serious history in this hairstyle, do you know that? A story.”
The hairstyle in question is initially shown as an unfinished work of art (or travesty if you’re a competitor hoping for a fellow stylist’s downfall): a mess of strands that’s easy to see through and hard to make sense of. But as the film progresses, Cleve creates a truly beautiful and engrossing design out of what was once incoherent webbing: a glowing ship upon a wave of hair, meant to be a recreation of the Orient, the flagship of the French fleet from the Battle of the Nile in the late 1700s, whose untimely, explosive demise has inspired poetry and numerous paintings.
History is key to Thomas Hardiman’s Medusa Deluxe, which centers on a hairstyling competition that everyone involved treats as a matter of life or death—and not simply because everyone is trying to stay cool under pressure after a literal murder takes place. Following the sudden death of one of the competition’s star stylists, the film is propelled forward by the fraught histories between all of its contestants, which are teased out in catty conversations and frustrated monologues that seem on the verge of another fight (or even murder). This slow but steady sharing of information has the spirit of a stage play that drops the viewer into the action with little context other than a setting and a situation. These charming and brash personalities are also expertly kept at an arm’s length by the camera: cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s single-take, real-time “follow shot” tethers the viewer to a single character at a time, often lingering on nothing but the back of a head, deliberately withholding faces and surroundings until a purposeful pan or pivot.
Simply describing Ryan’s work here as “long takes” (or, more accurately, a delicately manufactured single long take) is something of a disservice. These camera and actor movements aren’t necessarily on the operatic level of, say, Brian De Palma’s long takes, which more deliberately indulges in an omniscient cinematic perspective, but it isn’t quite the almost-removed and relatively fixed perspective of something like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). If anything, Medusa Deluxe is somewhere in the middle; attached to certain characters (like Cleve and Kendra) while also willing to leave them in the distance if someone more interesting or necessary to the unfolding of the plot comes into frame.
Medusa Deluxe (Thomas Hardiman, 2023).
Although the one-shot film has become commonplace in recent years, serving as the backbone of films like Sam Mendes’s 1917 (2019), Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2020), Chris Kentis and Laura Lau’s The Silent House (2011), and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2015), Medusa Deluxe stands out among its contemporaries. This technique has gained prominence in the last decade thanks to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), which is notable in the way it stitches together tracking shots to create the illusion of continuity. But the follow shot has been a familiar device in cinema for much longer, being used to chilling effect in films like Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), or providing the key visual language of works like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), and Alan Clarke’s film of the same name that served as its inspiration. It’s this immersion in the narrative through the camera that allows the viewer to, if not forget, then at least separate, the technical majesty of the camera’s movement and the actors’ blocking, absorbing them in this limited and unpredictable scope that never feels myopic in perspective.
These films all share an interest in world-building, but Birdman in particular is weighed down by self-seriousness. It’s a film that longs to “say something,” but instead of committing to any given commentary, its characters deliver empty monologues about which things are meaningful and which things are vapid. Take Birdman’s villainous critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan) and her extensive diatribe about killing the play that Riggan (Michael Keaton) is mounting. “I’m going to destroy your play,” she says, sight unseen, blaming it simply on him taking “up space in a theater which otherwise might have been used on something worthwhile” and assaulting him with a barrage of adjectives like “entitled,” “spoiled,” and “untrained” that have no weight in a film that, ultimately, has shown us no insight into either actor nor critic. It isn’t just that Iñárritu seems to be working through his own baggage via these mouthpieces, reducing his enemies to caricatures. He then attempts to work in something of an autocritique through Riggan’s daughter Sam (Emma Stone) when she says to her father (and, thus, the director’s stand-in), “You’re not important. Get used to it.” But what, if anything, is important in Birdman? It’s a film that wants to wallow in (and counterproductively laugh at) the misery of its tortured protagonist, though the film certainly never adopts Riggan’s perspective with any specificity, as much as it wants to luxuriate in the suspense that its off-the-cuff construction attempts to create.
This is where Medusa Deluxe sets itself apart and, at times, almost feels like a direct response to the presumptuous gravitas of Birdman (down to British electronic musician Koreless’s compositions for the film sounding like a parody of Antonio Sánchez’s incessant, off-kilter drumming for Birdman). If Birdman’s aesthetic design adds up to a thin farce, Medusa Deluxe’s artificiality is neither self-serious nor contemptuous: it’s part of the film’s charm, using technical prowess to probe deeper into a thicket of relationships. It actually leans into the jazzy unpredictability that Birdman wishes it could harness while anchored by characters who are as sincere as they are ridiculous, as genuinely tortured as they are proud of their work and lives. While fleshing these personalities out, Medusa Deluxe also embraces the “camp” nature of its premise and colorful characters, which works surprisingly well with the influence of kitchen-sink realism on its monologues. To (perhaps exhaustingly) quote Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” “The whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious’. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”
Medusa Deluxe (Thomas Hardiman, 2023).
Medusa Deluxe navigates that divide between the serious and the frivolous on practically every level, which is as much due to the electric work of all of its actors as it is to Hardiman and Ryan’s indulgent long takes. There’s something so simple, yet absurdly comical, about the way that simply fixating on these garish but beautiful hairstyles (courtesy of the inimitable Eugene Souleiman) lends these extended scenes an immediate sense of fun; a wink to the audience to let them know that they should be having a good time, like if they themselves were in costume at a murder mystery party. The real pleasure isn’t necessarily in understanding whodunit, but in joining the filmmaker and his talented cast in embracing all of the artifice and character the film has to offer.
The distinct stylization of the camerawork—even in moments where the character in focus is firmly stationed in a room and conversing with someone across from them—is key to why Hardiman’s film works so well as a film, in a way that isn’t so far off from why Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation of his play The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (1972), with all of its lengthy takes, works so exquisitely as a film. It’s in the way that the camera, ever the voyeur, adjusts just slightly to emphasize a certain character’s reaction to a phrase or action. At one point, the film homes in on a close-up of Cleve’s face for a solid three minutes as she navigates her conflicted feelings about the competition; as she describes to Divine (Kayla Meikle) how she’s been robbed of a win, the camera shifts focus to Divine as she prepares to dish out a secret that might change Cleve’s perspective. The performers themselves may be doing much of the heavy lifting in bringing the script to life, but the camera subtly trains us to worry about these characters once they’re removed from our point of view. There’s as much anxiety in following a character on the search for a murderer as there is in being forced to wonder about the fate of anyone we’ve left offscreen.
One of Hardiman’s previous shorts, the animated Pitch Black Panacea (2019), serves as an ideal comparison point. Although its main characters are plunged into a pitch-black space—part of a journey to fix their lazy eyes—the voice actors are able to not only paint a verbal picture of what appears in their mind’s eye, but also to flesh out exactly who they are and what they think of their place in the world. Medusa Deluxe similarly thrives on its dialogue and performers, taking great pleasure in developing the kinds of personalities you might actually find at a salon, but without sacrificing their comic charm. There’s beauty in watching Heider Ali’s Gac go from a weird security guard to a tragic lover, in seeing how Kae Alexander’s Inez proves herself to be a comforting spirit when she could have easily been just another vapid model donning a rainbow-colored hairstyle.
You believe these people care about their artistry, about their partners, but are also hyper-aware of their performances, be it when Luke Pasqualino goes for broke with comically over-the-top gay mannerisms and reactions, or Perkins brings her experience from the modern soap melodrama EastEnders to the table. Elsewhere, Meikle’s performance as uber-religious stylist Divine could easily fall into pure caricature—she literally stages a choral performance of the Joubert Singers’ “Stand on the Word” for her hair presentation, itself an extension of how Divine, down to her name, is selling herself as a saintly figure through how she performs in front of competitor and friend alike—but remains grounded through the casual naturalism of her delivery.
In a world in which everything is artificial—from the abundant hairspray needed to keep one’s hair in check, to the deliberately obfuscating and revealing movements of the camera—we are forced to constantly reassess our expectations of what might lie beneath that very artificiality. Substance can, and should, exist within style; they go hand in hand, and style is often the ideal way to deliver that substance. Is the substance what a given character is presenting forthright, or what they told someone over the phone while having their hair styled, or what someone else whispered about them at the salon just the day before, or even the Pet Shop Boys ringtone that reveals a little something about their taste? There’s some serious history in every hairstyle, in every person, and Medusa Deluxe is just as finely and playfully structured as any damn one of them.