Pink Wall
Tom Cullen's directorial debut drifts through the disquiet of an unfolding romance in six acts
Pink Wall is a story in six acts over six years, although the opening scene – in which the loud, public use of ‘cuck’ as an insult causes an outburst of anger – foregrounds it thoroughly in the present day. The directorial debut from Welsh actor Tom Cullen, it follows Tatiana Maslany’s Jenna and Jay Duplass’s Leon, an American couple in an ambiguous UK city, as they grapple with a slew of potential roadblocks, including but not limited to her clear-eyed careerism, his stoner inertia and the nagging ticking of her biological clock.
The casting of Duplass is instructive: he and his brother are synonymous with mumblecore and, accordingly, there are moments in Pink Wall that lurch close to the pitfalls of that genre and stultify the audience’s empathy, particularly an extended sequence in which a group of friends discuss their sex lives around the dinner table. Intended as an exercise in barely-concealed tension, it instead plays out like an exhibition of first-world problems.
Pink Wall’s triumphs are the quiet ones, the ones that don’t feel excessively set-piecey, where genuine intimacy between the leads is conjured in playful conversations in the no-man’s-land between late night and early morning. Maslany’s performance is powerhouse, and it’s worth remembering that crafting and delivering dialogue that feels as natural as when Jenna spills her anxieties about potential motherhood to Leon on a park bench is harder than it looks by a very long stretch.
Pink Wall isn’t quite nuanced enough to provide us with a genuinely fresh look at the complexities of relationships; where this particular kind of film is concerned, the high watermark remains Joe Swanberg’s masterful, and sorely underrated, Drinking Buddies. Misguided, also, are the comparisons with Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, not least because Cullen tells this story with a much softer touch. What it does do, in low-key fashion, is provide us with some measure, reminding us that the highs can be wracked with anxiety, and that there’s room for a sense of humour among the lows.