I applaud Trance for being perhaps the only movie I’ve seen to date that uses vagina hair as macguffin (macmuffin?). I didn’t like it much, but the sound designer who created the illusion of Rosario Dawson trimming her pubic hair offscreen by using a sound effect that I can only describe as a wool farmer shearing sheep deserves at least an Oscar, if not a Nobel Prize. She then emerged onscreen looking obviously waxed, incidentally, as if whatever machine she’d been using that sounded like something you’d have to pull start was capable of removing pubic hair follicles at the roots, but I guess that’s just movie magic. Suspension of disbelief, pubes, etc.
In any case, Trance is one of those movies where you can practically feel the storyteller working SOOO HARD to make it obtuse and convoluted and increasingly revelatory, only the story never works in the first place, and you don’t know whether to feel impressed, angry, or sad about all the painstaking embellishments. It’s like this beautifully elaborate origami weave of story strands that I didn’t believe for even a single second. It aspires to be ornate and constructed in the way that Inception is, with a labyrinthine plot that’s like a series of complex keys and locks and levers and combinations that eventually lead to an Advent calendar nugget of catharsis, only in this case your calendar is filled with pigeon shit, because once you scrape away Trance‘s convoluted complex form, the story is at best implausible and at worst laughably stupid. It’s about the journey, I guess. Without presenting a single character that you might care about, it’s just one massive logic leap after another until you want to scream “Dude, where the f*ck are we going with this?!” And there’s never any good answer. But a lot of it seems to come back to pubes, which is interesting.
