Insignificance

"There's a marvellously enigmatic phrase of Einstein's, which I read somewhere. He was looking up at the night sky, looking into the blackness, and he suddenly said 'Something is moving'. We must have a sense of something greater than ourselves, we must have a sense of wonder and awe about ourselves … That's what I like about the title of the piece: the idea that the world, society, has very little sense of a mystical movement of things. What it means is not that 'it's all insignificant' but that nothing has more significance than anything else "

Nic Roeg Relatively Speaking
[Monthly Film Bulletin, 1985]

After the truly epic scale of Eureka - and the impact its indifferent fate must have had on its chief creator - Roeg's next picture was greeted in many quarters as a surprisingly modest affair.
Goodness knows why.

We meet four characters - The Actress, the Professor, the Senator and The Ballplayer - on a hot, New York night.

That they have strong overtones of Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio respectively is but one onion-skin of Myth that this concise and frequently amusing film peels.

Between shooting what looks like The Seven Year Itch, the Actress demonstrates the (General) Theory of Relativity to the Professor.

The Professor remembers his implication in the Hiroshima bombing. The Senator tries to compel him to testify, and mistakes the Actress for a hooker. The Ballplayer tries to retrieve his failing marriage to the Actress, or simply talk to her away from the circus baggage her fame drags along.

Amongst all this "the movie has not only Roeg's customarily bracing alertness but, in tandem with its seriousness, a toylike sense of play as well that is new to his work" [Michael Dempsey, Film Quarterly]

Insignificance benefits from playwright Terry Johnson's deft comic touches. Superficially the film remains largely set-bound in New York hotel-rooms, but this opening-out of his stage-work is an object lesson in adaptation.

Like Roeg's subsequent film, Castaway (1986) - which elicited a late, superb performance from the oft-underrated Oliver Reed - Insignificance is rounded off with impressive lead roles from all four players, with Tony Curtis drawn to rare excellence. A stand-out frequently overlooked is Theresa Russell, who manages to combine Monroe-isms with an all-together more touching vulnerability.

Insignificance won the Technical Award at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival - one of only a handful bestowed on one of Britain's greatest post-War motion-picture artists.

Oh, and in the opening film-shoot sequence, his presence briefly becomes manifest, in a Hitchcock-like cameo among the film-crew….