Great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia (The Winter's Tale*)

This is a review of Wreckers (2011)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 April

This is a review of Wreckers (2011)

* Please be aware that, without giving the plot, there may be significant detail revealed *

Great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia

In context, these words - in the opening lines of the first theatre production where I was so involved in the mechanics of the text and how it was delivered that it amounted to immersion in the play's world and language - do many things all at once:

* They introduce Camillo to us straightaway (and by name), because the speech is addressed to him - he has a difficult and all-important decision to make just scenes away, and we need to know who he is

* Established at once, in these words, is that we are in Sicilia, but that Bohemia and it, where Camillo has come as part of an embassy, are - the person speaking to him thinks - poles apart

* So we know immediately that we are in a royal court**, and that it is with the lives of such people and those, such as Camillo, who are employed by them that we shall be concerned

* But my last point is my main point: wherever Bohemia and Sicilia may be (and I had very little conception at the time of that production where they are - after all, I think that finding Illyria on the map might prove rather taxing), they are not here

* It is a depiction of things happening that is openly declared to be somewhere else


Dictynna Hood's first feature (Wreckers (2011)) is, itself, almost immediately and unequivocally established as being set somewhere specific. That place is not specified (except by how David and Nick, who grew up there, speak, if one had an ear for that accent (and there is a credit for the person who worked with them and others to make them sound from that area)), but it is not Bohemia or Sicilia, but rural England.

Which is part, of course, of what makes it so disturbing - just fleetingly, just at times. That feeling is reminiscent of, but also very unlike, Pinter's vision of what could be happening in everyday scenes set in unremarkable streets, maybe does happen. The things that we don't know about, or - more like it - pretend that we don't guess at or are not interested in.

And this is a village in Britain, where (although they would always claim not to be nosy) everyone knows everyone else's business: we are even told, in (I think) a scene on a street in the village itself that a man was known to sleep with his daughter. This place where even incest is something that, although not exactly witnessed, isn't anybody's business to report (just to be aware of), is where a drama plays out that involves Dawn and David, their neighbours, and their not entirely welcome visitor Nick, David's brother (or are we even so sure of that?). So, Dictynna Hood seems to be saying (and I mention this topic, not becase it is what happens, but because sexuality and the urge to have sex, to procreate, is shown to be a strong force).


Slight diversion (but not really)

The veneer of our society is of such a kind that, if an unheard-of businessperson and his or her colleagues and / or business associates or would-be clients, go to a live sex show, then So what? It's a free country!. These claims, perhaps less made now, about freedom, and the reality of when such private matters suddenly become public, do clash, however:

For it would be better for that businessperson not to become a Cabinet minister and continue to do such things, or not to have concealed (as best he or she can, by any means he or she has at his or her disposal) all trace of ever having done them (now or in the past), because politicians, in the UK at least, are meant to be above reproach. (Even if the reproach sometimes comes from members of the press who would have no objection to personally doing whatever they state they are condemning.)


Back to the film...

I hinted at Pinter, but it is an edginess of its own that Dictynna has shown us here, one that inhabits these people, their behaviour, maybe where they live. Much is not spelt out, although (and there may be doubts whether what he says is true) it seems that Nick has some sort of experience of post-tramatic stress, the brothers have lied (but which one?) in a way that attributes their actions to the other and vice versa, and that there are immense and largely unadmitted feelings of jealousy, anger, rage and hatred.

They are almost, without in any way diminshing from how they are drawn, characters who step forward momentarily as if an everyman or -woman, an archetype, and then step back into being the sorts of people that we may find it hard to admit that we are ourselves deep down, in this England where there is still a show of respectability, and what goes on in the bedroom - and who is in the bed - is best not known or talked about.

This sense, quite a subtle one, of one standing for all makes this a powerful and resonant film, and I just hope that I have the chance to see it again, ideally on a big screen.


End-notes

* I have posted already that it is often enough wrongly called A Winter's Tale.

** Not The Royal Court!


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Wreckers comes home to roost: report on a Q&A at the Arts Picturehouse

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

26 April

NB This is a report on the answers given to the more significant questions, and a review of the film (presently in draft) will appear elsewhere. * In consequence, please be aware that there will, almost inevitably, be spoilers *


On Tuesday night, I watched the screening of a first feature by Dictynna Hood, someone to whom I had previously spoken, several years ago, about the documentaries that she was making. (Before she was lionized by Tony Jones and his crew, of whom Trish Sheil was going to introduce Dictynna - who wrote and directed Wreckers (2011) and host the Q&A afterwards, I just had time to ask her whether she had enjoyed making this film, which she largely had.)

As, with a Q&A, I formulate a question mentally and try to hold it during the rest of the film, to ask as soon as the initial questions from the person hosting have died down (so that I do not forget my formulation), I came out with (something like):

You mentioned fairy tales and stories from Fenland – what I found in this film was delight, a sense of possibility, things revealed, things overheard or witnessed, tension, jealousy, menace, fury, and I wonder, Dictynna, how deep you had to dig in yourself – or in ancient sources – to find these impulses?

The latter part of the question, with its humorous implications that she might do or want to do the things that her characters do, made her laugh infectiously. She had already mentioned that she had taken strands from real experiences and the lore of the four Oxfordshire villages, now changed beyond recognition by the overlay of the motorway and its traffic, so she had filmed in and around Isleham - and she mentioned the looks and queries that she had received at another screening in Oxford the day before.

As the questions came (and there was a good turn-out and much interest), Dictynna said more and more, opening up as the film does – opening up vistas – as questioners wondered about the status, as dream, of the start of the film (which, as it stands, someone had wanted her to consider dropping, and for which she had also shot a scene in a chapel, also in or near Isleham, which she said was so beautiful as to be unusable, because it looked as though it belonged in a different film – maybe, someone suggested, still to be made, when she alluded to the footage being on the cutting-room floor*).

Others asked about menace during and at the very end of the film, and it turned out that not only had the ending had been thought of very differently, but that, at one point in the conception, the whole thing could even have been much more of a horrorfest! However, not perhaps as alarming as parts of a wheat-field (whose owner Dictynna was most pleased to see in the audience) - the ones that we did not see, which had been trampled by the crew to get the on-screen shot.

In comments, there was interest in and appreciation of how the countryside had been presented, and I asked a further question about location, because there are many instances of people walking, often enough in twos, both in the village and elsewhere: Hood explained that, in shooting in Isleham (which, although not on a through-route, is apparently busy), she had focused on Dawn with David’s long-lost brother Nick (Shaun Evans) on the pavement and shut out the cars to create a deliberate effect.

The perennial question about when in the making the composer (Andrew Lovett) had been involved came up, and, unusually for films, the answer was that, as one of three with whom Hood had worked before and had been approached when it was at script stage, he self-selected by his desire to engage with the work.

Dictynna also commented that the use of music had been deliberately sparing on his part, and he had made use both of silence, and processing the actors' voices to make sounds that one could not quite distinguish, which people present seemed to agree imparted a dream-like element that they also found pervasively in Wreckers, a blurring between what was dream and what seen.

Towards the end of the session, Dictynna revealed more, including a source of the main story in a Viking text, and also a story about the devil (though Nick, she stressed, has other qualities than mere devilish ones). (As she agreed with me when I said a few words afterwards, there are all sorts of resonances, including Shakespearean ones).

Finally, we were told that two more projects are being worked on, one - of all things - a romantic comedy, so watch this space…


End-notes

* It's always made me think, subconsciously, that hairdressers must be much more house proud, because there the floor is swept clean of cuttings several times per day...


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