Writer and Director: Ben Hecking
Fleabag is an overused reference point for contemporary writers and filmmakers but Ben Hecking’s new film Haar, showing at the BFI London Film Festival 2023, borrows greatly from it in this confessional dramady set in a single 24-hour period with a central character whose hapless personal life and emotional struggles fill the film’s 80-minute running time. While protagonist Jef never speaks to camera, the same blend of trying to navigate life, work, sex and family struggles places the movie in the same space as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series but Hecking films it on Super-8 for a classic, washed out feel that suits the everyday nature of the characterisation.
Left to deal with some loose ends after filming a vampire series in Budapest, Jef spends a day travelling round the city, trying to figure out whether the are-we-aren’t-we relationship with the show’s lead American actor is real and if he is serious about her. Delivering wrap gifts, bumping into ex colleagues and attending parties to pass the time, Jef struggles to connect with those around her especially after a phone call from home throws her into a reflective mood.
Haar is another Festival story about life behind the camera and the mechanics of planning and cleaning up after a shoot which has both physical and emotional connotations. Hecking’s drama is a warts-and-all intrusion into Jef’s life as she careers from one ill thought-out encounter to another while holding nothing back from the audience. We see her awkwardness delivering gifts to people without knowing what’s in them, having graphic phone sex with her maybe-lover and hearing some home truths from an ex she meets unexpectedly because everything is filmed in Budapest these days.
Kate Kennedy’s central performance is all interior, we see Jef lose herself in the moment but equally regret the tenure of her interactions shortly after they have happened. She is both shameless and full of shame in equal measure and somehow unable to reconcile the external impression she wants to create with the messy, uncertain and ultimately lonely internal person she struggles to control. It never makes her angry and Kennedy’s performance is meaningful as her various difficulties make Jef morose and lacking in energy by the end of the movie.
Budapest is a strong secondary character, and away from the tourist hotspots, Hecking’s Super-8 which feels welcoming, even safe as a living modern city full of real people, not merely a chocolate box Euro-destination that distracts from Jef’s multi-layered crises of self. Secondary characters appear on the periphery including a driver who gets a small monologue about his own broken family but in Jef’s almost complete and not always sympathetic self-absorption other people barely exist.
Haar, we discover later in the film is a made-up word for a fog that Jef remembers descending and consuming her as a young child, speaking to a connection with her father that eventually underpins some of her difficulties. But while well told, Hecking’s film doesn’t tread much new ground in its presentation of a young woman coming apart but refusing to help herself.
Haar is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
