Directed by Wash Westmoreland
Out on Netflix
Reviewed by Ashley McGovern
The quest is over. Watching Netflix’s latest original, Earthquake Bird, I think I’ve found the weirdest of all movie dance scenes. Naturally there’s competition, but directors with real skill have the knack of turning bizarre boogaloos into things of immemorial beauty. Think of Barbara Steele with her mad eyes writhing about in Fellini’s 8 1⁄2. Godard’s Bande à part features arguably the most influential of cool dance sequences. Gene Kelly, Tarantino, Travolta, Romy and Michelle, The Leopard. There’s too many glorious toe taps to recall, but the bit in Wash Westmoreland’s movie, I promise, will stick with you.
It comes halfway in, at a crucial time for the main love triangle. Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander), an expat in Japan in the late 1980s, is in a club with her new boyfriend, local arty photographer, Teiji. Tagging along as is the new girl in town, a walking cliche of Stateside bacon cheeseburger proportions – the bouncy, frizzy-haired and empty-headed American expat, Lily Bridges (Riley Keough). Teiji crosses the dance floor to get Lucy a drink – but he doesn’t get past Lily’s fun-loving nature that easily. She stops him in his tracks. She then eggs him on to dance with her to a bubblegum J-Pop number, which he does and by doing so offers the viewer a minute or so of excruciating, horrifically awkward, pseudo-intimate shimmying. Everything about this is wrong. It’s supposed to be a glimpse of a love triangle in bloom; it’s supposed to show how Teiji, who up to now has led the emotional life of a ring binder, has more sides to him. It’s aching to be suspenseful and lusty when it’s just flat-out burn-all-evidence-of-it dad dancing.
But the movie isn’t about dancing, thankfully. It comes specially bound in Netflix’s bullying sobriety. This is a movie you have to take seriously. Earthquake Bird opens with good time gal Lily having gone missing and presumed dead. And over the course of this dull, absolutely shapeless thriller suspicion clings to Lucy, the fragile foreigner who surprises herself with how jealous she can get. But O the romance. Lucy and Teiji meet on the streets of Tokyo as he’s taking photos of puddles. In cliched movieland, this means he must possess magnificent talent and a deep mind. Anyway, she’s lured in with his mysterious blankness (mediocre acting on the part of Naoki Kobayashi) and his gnomic little gaffes about truth and art. Slowly a dark side reveals itself: his drawers are full of obsessive photographs of other girls. Is Lucy his new muse? She’s even more insecure when the chirpy American pixie girl Lily turns up and strikes a bond with Teiji. It’s as predictable as it sounds. This is a psychological thriller for people who find arrow words psychologically thrilling.
Most scenes don’t even try to connect to each other. There are aimless trips to Sado island, scenes where Lucy and Lily share a bed and come just close enough, purely because latent bisexuality is (even in this day and age) a sadly male-gazing noirish trope – so has to be in the film by cinematic default. Nothing is sense-checked, everything is hurled at the screen in a desperate attempt to create disquiet. Even the title – just say the phrase over again. Say it out loud for a second. ‘Earthquake Bird’ is obviously what Amber from Love Island would call her debut poetry collection.