Depending on your level of cynicism, your scam alarm bells may sound from the first pan flute notes that open Bad Behaviour.
Inspired by her time at meditation retreats, Australian actor Alice Englert’s debut directorial feature – which she also wrote and stars in – is filled with desperate figures who will try anything for inner peace.
Lead among them is Lucy (Jennifer Connelly), once a child actor and now in her 40s, trying to shake off a defensive coldness that’s getting between her and her daughter Dylan (Englert), who is working as a film stunt actor in New Zealand.
Lucy checks into an Oregon retreat operated by self-professed guru Elon (Ben Whishaw) where, with fellow searchers, she meditates on would-be koans like “it’s both” and “don’t give into hope”, paying and praying to crack them open and find healing within.
Much of the film takes place at the retreat, but the movie’s central tension concerns a woman who works in the screen industry in the shadow of her famous mother – and with Englert playing the daughter, it’s tempting to read it autobiographically. Englert’s mother is Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jane Campion; when Bad Behaviour screened at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, it played alongside a 14-film Campion retrospective.
Born in 1994, Englert grew up on many of the sets of those films before, at 12, starring in her mother’s short The Water Diary; she later played a vindictive teen in Campion’s Top of the Lake, and featured in Power of the Dog. Englert has also worked steadily across film and television in the past decade with directors such as Ryan Murphy, Sally Potter and fellow Australian Goran Stolevski, and directed two shorts of her own.
Englert was with her mother when she went on her first Bad Behaviour-esque retreat as a teenager. It’s ridiculous to look back on, she says, but she didn’t stop going.
“Honestly, I just wanted to get out of school,” says Englert, speaking over Zoom from Wollongong, where she’s been cast in a series to be announced. “[But] it left a deep impression on me … I really wanted the film to be more vulnerable than cynical. I don’t think you make fun of stuff you don’t love – or you can, but you’re just being a dick.”
Her mother has unavoidably loomed large over this film’s release, but rather than try to ignore it, Englert plays with it, with Campion featuring in a cute, brief cameo. As characters, Lucy’s relationship with Dylan is razor-barbed, the two cutting each other whenever they touch; Englert is aware viewers may read their mother-daughter relationship as a stand-in for her own. “I know people are always going to try and look for that kind of stuff. But I felt confident because it’s not my relationship with my mother, so [I decided] it wouldn’t matter how much people asked me.
“I was worried that she would feel …” Englert says, trailing off before landing on an adjective – “but then she loved it.”
At the retreat, Lucy is out of step as soon as she arrives, and she reaches towards cruelty with reflexive ease – especially towards Beverly (Dasha Nekrasova), a model in the group who prods back. As Lucy, Connelly is unsettling yet magnetic: pain writhes behind her eyes, a sense of frustration at her own casual cruelty and at her own innate delight in its power. “There’s a Caravaggio painting of Medusa with a look on her face that shook me to my core when I was a kid, a nightmare feeling,” Englert says. “I wanted Lucy to have that within her, to let that highly inappropriate, wrong rage be present.”
When she inevitably reaches her breakthrough/breakdown in a horrific-hilarious moment, Bad Behaviour’s second act shifts – and what comes next is far from a tidy ending.
The spectre of ageing is ever-present; the young model Beverley tells the group her darkest secret is that she’d rather die than grow old, and Elon, the guru, is enamoured with her. But he’s uneasy with Lucy, occasionally breaking his composure as if she’s dragging him down.
Otherwise, Elon is as unassuming as his plain woollen turtlenecks: it’s unclear whether he’s a knowing conman, constantly worried his next sentence will do him in, or whether he genuinely believes he’s helping these people. Englert wanted to keep it ambiguous.
“We’re quite scammy, as a species. I wanted Elon to sit in that ‘scam or real?’ spot,” she says. “I didn’t want Elon to be the charismatic rock star version of a cult leader – that’s not what I’ve seen the most of [at retreats]. I tend to see someone trying to sell something, like peace, that there’s no product for.”
At those retreats she went to, she says, “it felt like people were panning for gold. Enlightenment’s not really something you can conjure or grab on to or force, but everything in you is trying to do that anyway”.
The film’s subplot focuses on Dylan, fielding tense calls with her mother as she deals with an “on-set crush that fully crushes you”, as Englert puts it. She channels her emotions through her work as a stunt double, which has analogies for Englert as well.
“I’m fascinated by how you can roleplay pain and conflict,” she says. “Dylan thinks she can contain her pain and frustration in this setting, and that’s what I found in acting. There’s this open space where you could actually acknowledge things that you’re not supposed to talk about. I was always like: ‘Oh my god – this is an insane loophole.’”
Bad Behaviour is now showing in Australian and New Zealand cinemas
