Showing posts with label Andrew Scott. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Scott. Show all posts

Monday, 8 February 2016

Don’t you dare waste it !

This reconsiders Pride (2014) after a screening plus panel discussion

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

8 January

This reconsiders Pride (2014) in the light of a screening, plus panel discussion, at The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Monday 8 February at 6.30 p.m.



NB As this is not just in the nature of a review, it assumes knowledge of the film, i.e. *containers spoilers *

One of the touching aspects of the closing captions, watching Pride (2014) again, is that Sian James (Jessica Gunning) did take that advice from Jonathan Blake (Dominic West) [given in the title of this posting], getting a degree, and becoming an MP in 2005 : the film leaves one in a little doubt whether a preceding scene with Jonathan / Sian had been shot (but had to be lost to get down to 119 minutes), because the film’s style is generally not really just to tell you what it includes, but also to show it¹.

 [Since Bromley / Joe (George MacKay) is fictional, we have to imagine what happens to him when he abruptly leaves home, and whether, as the film shows Gethin Roberts (Andrew Scott) being¹, he is reconciled to his family, although, at Onllwyn, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) gives him advice that we see him follow.)


In the post-film discussion, the real-life Gethin Roberts suggests that the film is, which it is, about solidarity (in oppression), and that there are not [not his exact words] goodies and baddies. However, quite opposite to that latter view, and with the benefit of watching a film unfold and know (roughly) where it is going², there are actually clear elements of pantomime :

* Most obviously, the combination of a malign character egging on her stupid sons as her agents (Lisa Palfrey, as Maureen Barry)

 * The same woman, tricking those whom she opposes by catching them unawares (moving the time of the meeting)

 * Before that point, generating the bad press that causes the meeting to be called : although screenwriters adhering to a conventional model of a film’s development will have a difficulty arise, and the action develop from overcoming it (and, of course, seeming not to be able to) [and that is not what one happens here], one could almost imagine Maureen Barry talking to camera, saying what she is planning, and inciting the audience to hiss and boo her

* Almost where else, but in musicals, does someone win over affections or hearts by dancing² (as Jonathan does, at the Onllwyn Miners’ Welfare Hall ? – a spectacular moment from Dominic West, even if it was but, as Gethin Roberts told Screen 3 at The Arts (in describing the left-wing credentials of the real location), one of those plot-obstacles just alluded to above)

 * Probably for no very good reason, and not that Paddy Considine (as Dai) is not on top form in the film (as are so many others – please see below), not least when he makes a superbly scripted speech of thanks about Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, his character seems like Buttons, almost too good for this world

* Much as one should disregard any notion that it really means much, when reading about a film, to have something described as happening in the third act… (save that some films can, all too easily, be more programmatic than theatre, and fall into patterns already mentioned, with the initial situation, difficulties in the way, and a resolution), shots of The River Severn and one of its crossings (one forgets which, but one bridge did not exist then) do serve to punctuate, both giving us a breather (with some stunning aerial and scenic views), and mentally effecting the repeated transition from a city with an openly gay and lesbian bookshop (although not always well received) and how Pride chose to portray The Dulais Valley (Gethin gave us some facts about inclusivity³ in Onllwyn, and its not being as remote) to tell its story


One could go on, and risk just becoming more tenuous, but there is something about the way in which the characters are drawn (those of Dai and Maureen have already been caricatured a little) that lets them make an impact. From the start, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), to whom Joe / Bromley (George MacKay) looks up, is a committed campaigner for rights, seeing the connections / the similarity with others³, not the superficiality that separates.

One on one level of memory, one might recall this film for (the role of) MacKay’s character (and as an innocent, gay, coming-of-age story, grafted onto the historical narrative), with him gingerly going up from Kent to London to see what the Gay Pride march is all about. In fact, Bromley / Joe sticks in our mind because, structurally, he is really our way into (the life of) this film, and the way in which it unfolds is quietly pinned onto his being present :

He is there right from the first, stumbling out of the Underground station and into the parade, instantly to be met by Mike (Joseph Gilgun) – and at the end (with a brief hiatus of house-arrest by his mother (Monica Dolan), despite, after her husband has shouted at him, her work of seeming relative sympathy), as the marchers are assembling, stunning people such as Mark Ashton by how he now expresses himself. It is through Joe, in between, that we see the founding steps of LGSM (Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners⁴), as someone intrigued, but shyly confused and on the margins, who sees how people’s support drops off, and stays in, a little by default. For its purposes of concentrating on this group of people⁵, what the film does not show - until, at the end and by implication at least, it has to - is that there grew to be LGSM groups in eleven cities.

Indeed, as one of the panel of speakers told us, Cambridge had been one of those cities, with volunteers, and those who donated money and food, etc., providing support to mining areas in Nottinghamshire (and, also, South Wales ?) : a memory-project, where those who remembered that time had been invited to submit their contributions to a record of its history. (It is now written up, as Cambridge and the miners' strike, on the Internet here [www.cambridgeminersstrike.com].) Gethin Roberts, and the local representative (@AmnestyCambridg) from Amnesty (@AmnestyUK), talked about showing the film elsewhere in the world to those involved in strikes or political struggle.



It has been cheekily suggested (above) that Paddy Considine’s Dai might be seen as a bit of a pantomime goodie, but the role, as Stephen Beresford’s screenplay has given it to him and Considine has played it, is to the latter’s credit, as a portrayal of someone not afraid to stand up for what he believes, and to face a difficult situation with courage. In his way, for self-belief and leadership qualities, Dai is a structural counterpart in the film to the part of Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), with Dai’s speech at the gay club mirroring the reception that the party from LGSM seems set to receive at Onllywn, even when Ashton has announced them…

 On another level completely, away from the impact of set-pieces, there is a very affectionate moment (and also one of nicely underplayed humour) with just Bill Nighy (Cliff) and Imelda Staunton (Hefina), making sandwiches together in the kitchen at Onllywn : it might be that we are more engaged with the dialogue, and how Matthew Warchus has directed it, when Cliff tells her that he is gay.

If so, we might not see not only that these are hard times, so they are filling-less sandwiches, but also realize that, when she tells him how to cut them, he had been doing them that way at first, before his utterance. The comedy in her pretending to recall when she realized, and telling him that it was around the end of the 1960s, shows that she has cared about, and for, him that he thought that he had to keep a secret all that time, and that they know each other well enough that she can make making him know that she knew a little joke. Both actors play this short scene beautifully and tellingly.


As a whole, the screening was full of good spirits – even if, without being trite, Pride finds the positivity in the situation (with an engaging and appealing lightness of tone and approach), but does not play out what the NUM’s losing the strike was to mean (leaving that to films such as Still The Enemy Within (2014) [review still to come…]). Nearly the biggest laughter must have been when Hefina (Imelda Staunton) claims that she is driving the LGSM minibus to take them to Swansea [?] for a big ‘lezz-off'.


End-notes

 ¹ Gethin’s being attacked, which is what brings Sian and Jonathan to be in the same place, for obvious reasons is not (the film is rated 15), and, until the same place in the film, we are kept in suspense how he was received when he calls on his mother.

 ² Though one knew that there was that stupendous dance-scene, it occurred where, but not when, one recalled it…

³ One is reminded, as brought out by hearing from Gethin Roberts about the long-term links of the miners in South Wales with those in Spain, and their involvement with The Spanish Civil War and the efforts of Paul Robeson, Snr, for equality, of a documentary at Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) : Héroes Invisibles (Invisible Heroes) (2015), which is subtitled Afroamericanos en la Guerra de España (and one might interpret that as ‘The part played by Afro-Americans in The Spanish Civil War’).

⁴ Since Gay Pride, in the UK, had its roots in protests in the States, there is a certain irony that the American-Scottish Ian MacGregor, the nemesis chosen by Nicolas Ridley / Margaret Thatcher for the National Union of Mineworkers, was another US 'import', but one that LSGM opposed… (Rather puzzlingly, MacGregor’s Wikipedia® entry claims : Margaret Thatcher herself felt that he had handled the public relations aspect of the miners' dispute poorly, failing to empathise with the British public's widespread sympathy for the miners and their communities, and the pair were on cool terms after his departure from the NCB.)

⁵ Another consequence of eliminating our having an awareness of what LGSM was doing elsewhere is that the issue that is made to cause difficulty for the miners’ group to receive LGMS’s money artificially has to be made a local one about, literally, bad press and its ill-effects.

Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Monday, 22 September 2014

Accented to good effect

This is a review of Pride (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

21 September (updated 19 October)

This is a review of Pride (2014) (which screened at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), but was seen later)




At a greater remove (or distance) than when we first saw The Full Monty (1997) or Brassed Off ! (1996) (with, respectively, Tom Wilkinson (steel) and Pete Postlethwaite (coal) – and both films, perhaps, made in anticipation of New Labour coming to power in May 1997 ?), various film-makers have returned to the political struggle that was fought out, on the ground and in people’s lives and homes, between British Coal (in full (according to Wikipedia®) the British Coal Corporation) and the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) :


In addition to Pride (2014), we have had – at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@Camfilmfest / #CamFF) – Still the Enemy Within (2014) (write-up to come of a Q&A soon...), about the struggle to save pits / collieries, and references in Tony Benn : Will and Testament (2014), quite apart from the equally political We Are Many (2014) (dealing with the Stop the [Iraq] War campaign).

Yet the major influence on the content, look and characterization of Pride, and which had four screenings at the Festival, is Dancing in Dulais (1986) (NB, possibly through format issues / successive copying, the image-quality is not always good), where, in their own film, we see, for example, now identifiable members of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, we hear how and why Lesbians Against Pit Closures broke away, and we can listen to the real Mark Ashton explain the affinity with and solidarity for the miners’ position that led to LGSM (words / sentiments that are used in the film).


What Pride has done, however, is to seek to be maybe too entertaining / too comedic, whilst at the same time wanting to educate us about what happened (although, of course, that leaves us free to seek out material such as that contained in Dancing in Dulais for ourselves, if we want to look beyond the film) – to be too independent of the facts, when needed to drive the plot, but otherwise being close to them, so that there feels to be a compromise :


* Paddy Considine (Dai) has a free stage, and not so much as a heckle, in which to allow his words to reach out – yet it is supposed to be (so we have just been told) a potentially difficult crowd, but he does nothing special to begin with that would have made them accept him

* A mirrored Tom-Jones-like display of exuberance* has the standoffish miners won over in five minutes – both this one, and that with Dai, seem unnecessarily easy victories, if one really wants to build tension that is later released

* The opposition to LGSM’s involvement (is this just an invention to give the plot a turn ?) being focused on a trio of evil-minded people (members of one family) – as if, at one stage anyway, dazzling dance movements had converted everyone else to miners, lesbians and gays working together (as long as no one knew about it ?)

* Bromley / Joe (George Mackay) and Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) having a conveniently similar impulse, which gives the latter the occasion to tell the former what he needs to do with his life to make a real difference (on this day, we are made to focus on following a personal story, ignoring the relevance of what is happening to the battle that both men had been helping to fight – please see below)

* When the Gay Pride march in 1985 at the end turns out to have a greater significance, the film again serves its purposes by having us believe in surprise (as against planning and knowledge, which could have explicated the national NUM repercussions of events typified, for us, by our visits to The Dulais Valley)


Of course, we can accept these things for the sake of the fact that this is not a documentary, but is trying (albeit in an often comic way) to show LGSM’s story (and, within it, Joe’s, Mark's and Gethin's steps for maturity and independence), and how the miners and they influenced and affected each other for the better – and because, unlike Tom Hardy’s wandering attempt in Locke (2014), the Welsh accents, and performances, seem pretty good from the likes of Considine, Bill Nighy (Cliff), and Imelda Staunton (Hefina).

Snow, The Severn Bridge from unusual angles, and the local scenery complete the establishment of Wales as one locus, with London as a second, and make for the necessity to demonstrate that physical separation*** has effects – the aspect that is most clearly drawn out in the film. When those from the locii do combine, we see them receiving welcome, hospitality, and invitations to participate in social activity, and so engaging with life in the other locus.



Pride occupies a very different space on the continuum from Made in Dagenham, which, although also a film of positivity, feels closer to what Ken Loach is doing both in The Spirit of ‘45 (2013) and, arguably with even more political effectiveness, in Jimmy’s Hall** (2014). Dagenham also dares conflate several real people in the one figure of Sally Hawkins’ character of Rita O’Grady, whereas Pride, almost with veneration, chooses instead to give us mostly real individuals amongst the miners, their families and the supporters from LGSM :

Pride’s approach roots the story in actuality, so (in Dancing in Dulais) we hear marchers for Lesbians Against Pit Closures singing the chant ‘Every woman is a lesbian at heart’ (which the film locates on a minibus trip), and Dulais shows us the actual vehicle donated to the miners (and the caption / heading ‘Dulais wears our badge on its van’)).

However, it then means that the artificial ploys cited above by which Pride’s script gives rise to dramatic movement rely on non-historic developments : so, although LGSM’s film acknowledges that there was trepidation from the community before the first visit, it then asserts that, as Ashton had hoped, barriers were broken down between people who had both been oppressed by government and the police (probably not because one gay man amazed them with his prowess…)

That is a key message, and the fact that The Labour Party Conference (although it had debated them before) then officially embodied support for gay and lesbian rights shows that the links made between the striking miners and LGSM proved a commonality in their causes.



That said, at maybe too many times, it feels as if the film both has its cake and eats it, for it does not even outline in its written closing statements about Ashton and some of the others what the outcome was, in South Wales and other mining areas, for the NUM and its members – maybe Pride’s makers wrongly assume that everyone knows that part of the story (for it concentrates, in its ending, with the encouraging side, that of miners, gays and lesbians getting to know and value each other beyond The Dulais Valley) ?


End-notes

* Which one could object to both as an early deus ex machina that invokes Billy Elliot (2000) (another film that combines the miners’ strike and personal development), and as stereotyping the talents and interests of gay men (which ABBA capitalized on in ‘Dancing Queen’ ?).

Yet, according to what we hear in Still the Enemy Within, the apparent delay to LGSM's being welcomed, at the Onllwyn Welfare Hall, was actually only a momentary, hesitant quietening on their arrival - followed by a round of applause...

** Reviewed here.

*** The film cannot even resist having Gethin (Andrew Scott), again prompted to do so as Joe is by Mark, being shown visiting his mother, then rushing us on, only to return to the fruit of that contact at a testing time… That may have happened, but the film generally both wants to give the message that things can change, but rarely to show that happening in a credible way (with Gethin, we are not even shown that).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 13 May 2014

Remembering Rita - with a Postlude

This is a review of Locke (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

13 May (Postlude added on 14 May, Tweet on 11 June)

This is a review of Locke (2014)

In Educating Rita (1983), Rita (Julie Walters) writes an incredibly short essay for her Open University tutor about staging Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. She says that Ibsen did not envisage it on stage, but to be sounds, and that, to accord with his stated wishes, it should be a radio play.



(Willy Russell’s original play itself was just a double-hander between Frank (Michael Caine) and Rita, but his own screenplay inevitably widened the portrayal out to involve other characters.) This film’s strength is also its weakness, in that it only shows us Ivan Locke, although he is surrounded by voices, real and imagined.)

One tends to feel the same about Locke (2014) as maybe Ibsen / Rita did about Peer, i.e. that its relatively minimal visual quality (not least if one has the same evening watched the stunningly alive colours of Advanced Style (2013)) made it less of a film than an audio-file with images – although some of the (largely fleeting) tension might have been lost in a play for radio, one imagines that there could have been compensating adjustments made elsewhere in text, music and sound-effects.

So it is that cars that come right up behind Locke (Tom Hardy) on the M6* seem to remind him of his father, to whom (whether or not he is alive) he seems intent to prove himself different, e.g. that he gets things done**, and that, although he is tempted to shirk what he feels that he should do and, as he puts it, carry on around the M25 to Dover (?)), he will not do so. As to the rest, apart from the amber lighting that is there so that we can see his face, and the illumination that his gaze sheds onto the back of the car (in the direction of his father), the rest is pairs, Morse codings, egg-shaped blurs of lights from other cars and from the buildings that edge the motorway :

All very arty as an embellishment to what would otherwise be Locke, in his car, sometimes doing 80 (although he says that there is a speed-limit), and doing very little when not snuffling, addressing his father and very occasionally being quiet except talking to the same rough half-a-dozen people, plus a few others. Except that the M1, which he gets onto from the M6 (though with not much evidence of that very distinctive junction), certainly does not have incessant illumination on either side of the carriageway, and we seem to see the same red elevated awning of a petrol-station at least twice more, and the credits tell us that the filming on location was in London :

Which means that the distorted lights that vary the darkness are as fully added in as the stunning shots of Earth that enliven watching Sandra Bullock clumsily floating around in Gravity (2013). They are so obviously there (and they are occasionally quite dramatic), that they are integral to the work that we see. Are we meant to accord the effect the benefit of taking it at face value, or see it as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, to distance us from Locke himself ? Are we to credit that he fancies to himself that what he is about is a mercy dash, and so he has a thick jumper on, but the sleeves shoved up, because there is no time to stop ?

Something is up. Yet it is up in the way that film too frequently asks us to believe, where something is meant to be happening that has never happened before, and the film then comprises watching it unfold (maybe with the assistance of flashbacks, or other disjunctions in time and / or space)… As with Gravity, we might invest what we see with some significance, because it is new.

If, though, we do not, whether or not we mentally strip away the added visual elements, do we have a film even as striking as Enter the Void (2009), whose relative virtue is that it does not pretend that it is a slice of life that is unadulterated by music and by visual effects and a constructed sound-world ? Or does it, in this regard, resemble the unseen pair of characters Mitch and Murray in Glengarry Glen Ross*** (1993) (based on David Mamet’s play) in that, whether or not we know it, we suspect that we will no more see Bethan or what happens to Locke than we will them ?

Locke, however, delights in anonymity and keeping us uninformed. The ‘Home’ number on Locke’s hands-free device begins 01632, which the film is not alone in using for fictional purposes, for it is a UK area code [...] not in use and […] set aside for providing non-working, dummy phone numbers for drama, fiction and testing purposes. Yet the film studiously avoids other information :

* Locke mentions Croydon (or Crawley ?) to Katrina (Ruth Wilson), but he could never be heading there in the time that he estimates

* His son, stereotypically drawn back to the football match as if it is the new awkward topic to replace the weather, avoids mentioning another team / his own team

* Locke seems to say Argyll at one point, but he cannot have set out from somewhere near there (and the name of the place where the concrete is to be delivered seems fluidly indistinct**** ?)

* He has his boss Gareth’s number stored under Bastard (which is fair enough), but, apart from a rant at Locke, Gareth (Ben Daniels) seems powerless to do anything other than call Mitchell Dean[e] in Chicago and later report what he has been told to do : not much of a bastard, and the man whom they call ‘Chicago’ has a name that evokes Taunton Deane service-station on the M5 + Mitcheldean (in Gloucestershire)


Tom Hardy is not Welsh, and he does not at every moment sound Welsh (even to someone who shares his English background), although it can be disguised to some extent in the un-English stress-patterns that he is adopting. Then we have Gareth and Bethan as names of people who sound nothing but English, but is it another attempt to mislead ? In any event, Hardy is good, but Olivia Colman, as Bethan, has more to offer: she is somehow less hysterical than Katrina – but, then, she does appear to go to the theatre and read Beckettt.

Whereas Locke is just wrapped up in numbers, facts and codes, such as whether, in context, he has nine or ten years’ service, and it is only when he lashes out at his absent father (who, the film has us credit, is almost there at one point) that he feels any more than frustration that ‘my building’ might go wrong (shades of Ibsen again, in The Master Builder, with which there are a few parallels ?). He seems to care more about the concrete, as if it is a living thing, than much else.




Which is where the nub of the film lies, or it proves not to have much of one. Unlike the transcendental nature of Enter The Void, Locke feels banal, inconsequential – in Glengarry, so much more seems to be riding on what happens, yet here we have no notion that people will not be in a different mental mode overnight. And, for all the unwonted incaution of what Locke is about, it never rings true as any sort of clear breakdown (whatever, of course, a breakdown is) :

He may be depressed, but, if so the catalyst is unlikely to be the action that we see, but to inaction and self-recrimination along the lines of comparison with his father. It may be the early stages of a manic episode, and somehow everyone – Locke most of all – has overlooked that his seeming solidity lacks the infrastructure that he ironically busies himself providing in his work. Even if that is the intention, what this film encompasses is so slight, and the evidence of irrevocable damage to relationships (outside work) so uncertain, that it is in danger of popularizing impressions that may mislead.

The assertion also that there is a world of difference, for example, between ‘never’ and ‘once’ seems posture, convenient to bring in a binary, 0 or 1, dimension to life to match those coloured eggs that wink in the unreal darkness of night.



Postlude

One point of comparison has already been given in Gravity, but that is a film, frankly, that one has to agree ‘has the plot of a B-movie’, so what do we find if we turn our attention to All is Lost (2013) ? It has almost no speech, whereas Locke is really nothing but, yet points of connection are :

* The concentration on one seen character

* What Our Man (Robert Redford) faces is partly of his making by seemingly choosing to be where he is, though not for getting snagged and pierced by an abandoned container

* The need to travel on, whether to safety or what could be a new beginning

* Unfolding events that change the course or status of what has gone before


Any other links would probably be tenuous, but which is the stronger performance / script ? On both counts, it has to be Redford’s film, because the best engagement with Our Man is inferential, on the level of working out why he is doing what we see, since, of course he has no need to explain it to anyone (and a voice-over of him talking to himself would be dire).

If anything, Locke over-explains, and repeats itself : the son will always awkwardly divert to the game, the ‘pour’ will never be straightforward and risk ruin, and the reminders that Locke is on the road, and not heading home to sausages and beer (and his wife in the club shirt), will be hammered home. On this level and bringing in the near-solo Gravity again, Locke is a most unsubtle film, and Hardy is an onscreen equivalent of Clooney to Donal’s (Andrew Scott’s) offscreen Bullock (Donal panicks just as much as she does).

Special pleading for Gravity wants to say that Bullock’s Ryan Stone is a universal symbol for humanity and that it has a spiritual dimension, but what about here ? Film Eye’s complimentary programme tries to suggest, having quoted The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney about the look of the film, that :

The stream of car and road lights is mesmerising and seems to reflect Locke’s contemplation of his life and his predicament


Whatever Locke may have done before, he is now acting (or believing that he is acting) on principle to lay to rest the paternal spectre (and, as a curt mantra, he keeps saying to others – as if it exculpates him from responsibility – words to the effect I have no choice, whereas precisely the opposite is true, and it is only in the car on his own that his motivation, of proving himself to his father (and so proving the father wrong), is laid bare). We still have to ask the related question about this ‘predicament’, whether or not it is of his own making :

What effect does it have on us that some of these ‘car and road lights’ are added in, laid over what we see, which would otherwise actually just be a bloke in a car, making quite frequent phone-calls ? If we do not realize, then it is just a nice light-show, whose beauty and brilliance we will like, but come to take for granted as naturalism (although it is artifice). If, though, we have inferred what has been done, it is still not, as with Gravity, that we can necessarily see what is real / what fake, but the lights are then present to us with the knowledge that the basic image has been processed to have them there most of the time, and that it is more like some form of enhancement, of an allusion to hyper-realism. (But hyper-realism that is at its strongest when it is actually hiding behind semi-barked, serious utterances in a Welsh accent ? (Is the real notion of a joke something known to Locke, we might end up wondering…))

Thus, we come back to Enter the Void, and we come back to John Locke (1632–1704) – and this facetious Tweet :


— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 11, 2014

For Void’s hyper-reality is palpably artificial and never pretends to be otherwise, but it asserts that what we see is inhabiting other dimensions, which are apparent on drugs and in death (the old doors of perception theme, taken from Blake by Huxley, and from him by The Doors). Such a transcendent aspiration is given to Locke, but it is despite what he does and says, and, for example, it begs our indulgence that he has been with his wife Katrina long enough to have two teenage sons and yet does not have the remotest idea how to start to break something to her.

Instead (and attribute it to his being in shock, if you like), he twice prefaces how he has formulated what he wants to say with the very platitude that she latches onto, though both times she listens to him say it in silence. Clearly, something different is afoot this night, but is this naturalism, or is it symbolic – symbolic, say, in the way that the story is behind Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, with its roots in Richard Dehmel’s poem of that name (the news broken there is different, but of a similar kind) ?


— BFI Player (@BFIPlayer) April 26, 2014

Could the vehicle in which Locke is travelling, under the influence of engaging with the philosophy of the other Locke and his arguments in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) that there are no innate ideas, be a sort of second womb where he, through his eyes and ears, becomes open afresh to sensory information ? We watch him turn these sense data into material on which to reflect in his journey and approach them from first principles…

Can Locke, as with Void, really be setting out general principles about life in the guise or medium of a film ? On one basis, it leaves uncertain the outcome of what we see befall Locke (though we did not know him before, for that matter), on another it has taken the simple footage of an apparent North to South journey and, by processing it, created colours and lights outside of reality, and maybe done so to impart truths on a symbolic level.

Somehow, it is hard to conceive that this is so (any more that it has the claims that Film Eye suggests to resemble Under Milk Wood) rather than it was just to make Locke look more interesting, but maybe it has been worth considering nonetheless...

Yet Film Divider's interview with Steven Knight, the film's director, certainly shows that the other Locke was part of his thinking :

He’s Lockean, as in the philosopher John Locke, he’s a rationalist and he tries to apply the theories of Locke, which would apply on a construction site, to the problems he’s now facing in life.



End-notes

* Locke appears to be one of these drivers who is wedded to the middle lane, so this will happen from those who do not think that he should be there.

** That remains to be proved, whether what he has managed to achieve at the wheel will come off flawlessly.

*** Or the two in Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter ?

**** Can it possibly be close to Home, so that Locke could then have left in the middle of the night to be there well ahead for the crucial time of 5.25 a.m. ? If so, how should it all have worked out, and, say, what reason did a file have to come to be in the car, rather than in the site office ?

There must be a site office (where Donal is being directed what to do), and Locke seems to had the relative luxury of its not being at a distance is the fact that it is relatively local what matters to him about it ? In any case, the holding company for the film is, appropriately, Concrete Pictures Ltd !




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)