One doesn’t have to delve too deeply into the name Electra to imagine tragedy’s-a-comin’ in the director Hala Matar’s stylish if somewhat vacant drama of the same name. Electra, after all, had roles in the works of the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides, among others. Here, the so-named beauty appears in flashback and her significance in the shifting relationships between two couples who meet in Rome and repair to a country house is fitfully revealed.
When the magazine writer Dylan (Daryl Wein) and his girlfriend and photographer, Lucy (Abigail Cowen), descend upon the rocker Milo (Jack Farthing), there’s subterfuge afoot. As Milo is accosted by an amorous fan at a restaurant, the pair look stunned. But are they really?
It turns out the fangirl is Francesca, Milo’s lover (Maria Bakalova giving a surprisingly sympathetic turn). In fleet order, the couples hit it off and Milo invites his chroniclers to Francesca’s family palazzo. But what’s the aim of Dylan and Lucy’s con exactly? Without spoiling things, it has something (but not everything) to do with stealing a painting of a unicorn. Its creator: Electra.
From its title sequence — one toggling between typefaces crowding the frame and the hushed scene of a person mopping a vast room — to its languid eying of the palazzo’s suggestive artworks, “Electra” declares its affinity for visual (and sonic) swagger. (Matar makes music videos, as well as films for fashion houses.) The flair is palpable. What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.
Electra
Not rated. In English and Italian with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters.
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