Hiding in plain sight

This is a review of High-Rise (2015)

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18 March

This is a review of High-Rise (2015)

High-Rise is not a short film, but it seems to handle with unnecessarily great brevity – either because one has been overly tempted that one will find out (Curiosity killed the cat, after all), or because Amy Jump’s adaptation of J. G. Ballard least wants to tell (if not maybe Ballard himself ?) – what, after the very opening¹, the inter-title ‘Three months earlier’ has one most expecting, i.e. something like 'a story', or, here, an explanation :

We may well end up feeling that there is an allegory in train that is essentially contentless, because it descends to typifications of character and social impulses from which one may easily disinvest, although it is concerned, as if tasked to be so, to proceed linearly back to the opening - for us to understand anew (or maybe feel that we were misdirected into construing awry ?). In contrast, a film such as Metropolis (1927) (to which we will return below : Ballard must surely be responding to Fritz Lang) is expressly, unmistakably a parable, whereas this film seems to have pretensions to be something else, but progressively withdraws (from) them : whether that is adaptation or original, we may feel that we are re-visiting the territory of a film such as O Lucky Man ! (1973), but arguably less interestingly (despite a little energetic reference to Pierrot le fou (1965) thrown in for good measure).

The result is remarkably emotionless – sex on the glass dining-table, and even with Charlotte Melville (Sienna Miller) hanging over the balcony of the twenty-sixth floor, all of which one knows should feel daring, but is actually as exciting as the lack of affect with which why Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) asks, and is answered, why the sex is not continuing, after it has banally been interrupted. Dr R. Laing (we must be reminded of R. D. Laing), from the Department of Physiology, is described by other characters as Hiding in plain sight, and, in a semi-naturalistic way, his look, physique, make-up, demeanour are all used to make him seem a creature apart, later subverted by that Godardian gesture of absurdity. (And, somewhere in all this, do we find hints of Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim, and that Jesse Eisenberg in The Double (2013) deserves greater respect than the film seemed to merit when it was released… ?)

Maybe the fact is that Ballard’s novel does not exactly have a narrative, which is what this review appears to suggest (and Will Self confirms - please see the Post-script) : Ballard moves us randomly up and down the (initially) tripartite building with chaotic aplomb; his narrative is controlled by the dysfunctional elevators, blocked by the broken chairs, cupboards, desks that jam the stairwells.. If so, this is surveying the building, from top to bottom and around, as an environment for, and one that has given rise to, one excess after another – almost as if Plato had got it all wrong, with The Republic, and authored chaos. But is High-Rise any better than, say, choosing Samuel Beckettt’s short story Le Dépeupler (The Lost Ones), if his literary executors would even allow one, as the basis for one’s screenplay - what, one would have to ask, would making a film add to what that text describes (there are some quotations below) ?

In fact Carmin Karasic's The Lost Ones seems to exist, as an immersive installation and VRML work based on Beckettt's text

By analogy with the focus of this film (or indeed this question whether it was best left as a novel, without the burden of visual representation ?), it is as if, in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), Andy and Lana Wachowski had taken a brief, but important, moment, and instead had it dominate the whole film : one thinks of when Neo penetrates to their own character called The Architect². What film, one has to ask, would it have been if that scene, when Neo realizes that what he had thought beforehand (i.e. that getting there was the be all and end all - which, to have him make the attempt, it was expedient that he believe), had been handled that way : not as Neo's impetus to what, in the light of his accepting the reality that he did not achieve what he expected and acting on it to provoke what next happens, but as an occasion for a massively extended philosophical and existential enquiry between The Architect and him [there appears to be a complete transcript of that scene, which is worth those who are unfamiliar reading, at http://www.scottmanning.com/archives/000513.php] ?

In being drawn to microcosm, though with a narrower focus, Ben Wheatley’s (@mr_wheatley’s) A Field in England (2013) is most like High-Rise, but Sightseers³ (2012) and it both have a concern for story-telling (even the former, for all its psychedelic elements), which is largely abandoned here, except in appearance. For although High-Rise, in its own terms (let alone that of its predecessors), often does not seem very cinematically motivated, it does enjoy employing visual spectacle, and gives us moments or set-pieces that it luxuriates in, such as when ABBA is being played by a string quartet, or with Laing patchily applying the contents of a small tin (for which he has absolutely fought tooth and nail), but somehow perfectly painting the whole of flat 2505 – and skating over what might hold any of this together...

In the event, maybe the film just asserts that there is no story, that that is just how things are when the lives of individuals, in a melting-point, battle it out. (This is part of the reason, despite its very different tone and purpose, for mentioning Le Dépeupler (The Lost Ones) above, and seeking dominance is certainly highly relevant in A Field in England, of course.) In the concluding minutes of High-Rise, Wheatley employs a laconic voice-over, which formally assumes the role of being informative, but now seems oddly inessential, given a scenario where it is patent, because at such length, that people in this place have abandoned everything to pursuing their self-interest, at any cost.

When the device of voice-over is used, one seeks after the utility in doing so : here, it seems to be to underline what has already been imparted, which is a sense of inevitability about the upheaval, of resigned fixity in the face of societal disintegration and chaos. Concluding a number of meetings that the screenplay choreographs, the architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) and Laing casually chat about these things, over a dinner of sorts (and that, as mentioned above, is specifically where one is put in mind of The Matrix Reloaded, when Neo encounters The Wachowskis’ Architect, and learns that he effectively exists and operates at the level of a computer program, albeit an anomalous one).

Charlotte Melville, after all, told Helen Wilder that Robert Laing is definitely the best amenity in the building (a building that, we should note, Royal's right-hand man Simmons claims, when Royal wants to sack him, to consider to be his employer, not Royal). On one level, as that terminal voice-over wants to suggest, High-Rise is about Laing, and the very familiar theme of the mercenary instincts of someone who becomes attracted to power, scheming, etc. (e.g. obviously O Lucky Man !, but also Bel Ami (2012), though it scarcely bears mentioning alongside Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) [It is better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody]).

On a parallel level within the film, and in common with Metropolis, which gives the youth of rich parents (such as Joh Fredersen’s son Freder) a sky-top place of pleasure in which to while away their hours (unlike the toil of working life underground, and the hours of respite on lower levels up from the workplace), High-Rise has an almost absurdly and floatingly unreal roof-space garden⁴. It adjoins The Architect’s penthouse, and, in imitation of Marie Antoinette at Versailles (cake is even suggested as a food at one point…), represents the life of the elite. (* NB Spoiler * Even if it is an elite that ludicrously believes that it can regain power by the implausible step of lobotomizing one individual, who is the perceived source of trouble.)

A still from Metropolis (1927)

God forbid, though, that Ben Wheatley, in filming this text, should leave us feeling cheated, as at the conclusion of Metropolis : no one need fear on account of appearing to be naively expected to embrace a resolution that, except on some symbolic level, hardly addresses the cause of all the disturbance and violence, by presenting a gesture and a form of words. (This highly unconvincing rapprochement that Fritz Lang gives us, as if it changes what we have seen, is mediated by Freder, between Joh Fredersen and Grot, the leader of the workers (and the foreman of The Heart Machine), who links their hands : we are told that There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator.)

Ballard must have explicitly wanted to reject that sense of papering over from Lang, but High-Rise arguably gives us not something else, but just the opposite extreme, where passionate urges do not get controlled reasonably. His novel, and its impact as a piece of writing, may be one thing. This film gives us, without the coherence or explanation that some might want (unless one simply subscribes to the view that an account of incoherent actions, intentions and the resulting processes and patterns has an innate right to be incoherent in its own right), a picture of where the brutal and horrific have become commonplace.

So what seemed grim and desperate when first seen is then how things have developed to be, with the connivance of all, and are as they are. But maybe Beckettt (translating himself from the original French of 1971), and not Ballard (from 1975), deserves the last word – who says, of those occupying the ‘flattened cylinder fifty metres round and [eighteen] high’ in The Lost Ones⁵ :

Obliged for want of space to huddle together over long periods they appear to the observer a mere jumble of mingled flesh. Woe the rash searcher who carried away by his passion dare lay a finger on the least among them. Like a single body the whole queue falls on the offender. Of all the scenes of violence the cylinder has to offer none approaches this.


Post-script

In The New Statesman (@NewStatesman), Will Self (@wself), who knew Ballard personally, and was even consulted by Amy Jump for that reason, concludes his piece about film adaptations of Ballard’s work (‘What would J G Ballard have made of the new High-Rise film ?’) by saying (about High-Rise) that ‘It may not be everyone’s idea of a laugh-out-loud film but, frankly, who cares what everyone thinks ? I don’t – and nor, quite obviously, did Ballard.’ Earlier, talking about when he met Jump, Self says (NB Contains spoilers) :

All I can recall saying is that she and [Ben] Wheatley had their work cut out, given that the novel has no proper plot to speak of, being, in essence, a series of flashbacks from a scene neatly encapsulated by the book’s opening line: ‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’


End-notes

¹ Playing the sprightly theme from the Allegro of Bach’s so-called Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 (in G Major, BWV 1049) [the link is to a performance of the Concerto, by Das Freiburger Barockorchester, on YouTube] deliberately sets up an incongruity at the outset with the grotesque manner of domesticity that we are shown. (Elsewhere, Wheatley uses material from one or two more of these Concertos as a method of effecting a dislocation between the pleasant civility of the music and what he shows us.)

² Planning the city in Metropolis, Joh Fredersen is another architect, and, of course, all of these take their lead from freemasonry’s tenets. (Both have a regal bearing, but Ballard’s architect (Jeremy Irons) is even called Royal.)

³ On whose screenplay Amy Jump also worked, with the film's stars, Steve Oram and Alice Lowe.

⁴ However, unless visual distortion (or some strange geometry) is at work, the extent of the walled garden is not matched to the footprint of the building (which, although it shifts across at the top of the tower, does not change).

⁵ The Lost Ones, pp. 7, 59-60. Calder & Boyars Limited, London, 1972.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)