Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Money well spent ?

Passport to Poland

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

20 May







Passport to Poland

To @UKIP with [g]love - with a silent 'g', more of a gauntlet really...

UK border control. A man stands in front of an official, who is behind a desk.


MAN

(Indignantly.) What do you mean, I’m Polish ? (With pride.) I was born in Braintree !



BORDER OFFICIAL


Do you have proof of that, sir ? (Man goes to interrupt, silenced by a finger.) By which I mean, are you carrying your birth-certificate with you… ?



MAN


No, but if you let me through, I could go home and get it. (The official just looks at him, almost pityingly.) But I suppose everyone says that… (Pause. Suddenly.) I know – what if I called my boss !



BORDER OFFICIAL


Sorry, sir – your passport states that you’re Polish (Man goes to interrupt, silenced by a finger.) – and so, I suspect, are the people I take to be your wife and daughters behind you. (A look silences a further attempt.)



Next in the queue, a woman in a cardigan and sandals, with a five-year-old pulling on her arm, and an eleven-year-old standing bored beside her, idly playing with her pigtails (as her iPad had to be switched off).


BORDER OFFICIAL


(Sing-song voice.) How is 'your boss' going to change that ?


(Abruptly, and without compassion.) Do you think that ‘your boss’ would prefer to deny knowing you to facing any 'difficult' questions ?



MAN


(Thinks, hesitates.) But…



BORDER OFFICIAL

Please ask your family – in your own language, if you like (The man looks surprised, but says nothing.) – to come over here with me. (He gestures to a waiting-area to one side, set out with a desk and chairs, and goes over to it with the passport.)


MAN

(Turns and speaks to them. Under his voice. Failing to interject any feeling of calm.) Don’t worry, dear – or you, or you. As you’ve heard, just some new procedure – picked out at random for some stringent checks – (As they approach.) just need to humour this chap, who’s pretending to think we’re Polish.


BORDER OFFICIAL

I’m not (The woman hands the other passports to him. He glances at them.) – pretending – to think that – you’re all Polish. You are all Polish !


WOMAN

(Indignantly.) But I’m a vicar’s daughter – from Brentwood ! (As the official looks at her.) And, no, I don’t have my birth-certificate, either…


BORDER OFFICIAL

Doesn’t matter, ma’am – you’re Polish now, and, to be frank, you need to accept going back to your homeland, rather than trying to sneak into England to set up a car-wash ! (Woman goes to say something, but cannot think what to say.)

Unless, although you’ve all got Polish passports, there is something that you can tell me to change my mind…

(Looks directly at the man.) And, no, I don’t mean that little question about what my wife likes to drink – or have I ever been to Norfolk, where you’ve got a lovely second home… !


MAN

(Getting up courage.) Now, look here – I’m going to complain to my MP !



BORDER OFFICIAL

Well, sir… (Flicks through the passport.) You can, of course, do that, but it seems that your MP is in Gdansk, where you now live.


WOMAN

But I’ve never even been to Gdansk ! (On the edge of tears.) Who would have thought that our holiday in Venice would end like this !



YOUNGER DAUGHTER

(Cackling.) Venethia, Venethia ! (Woman hushes her. Nonetheless.) Grand–ay, Grand–ay ! Venethia !



WOMAN


(To elder daughter.) Please take Ruth for a little walk – to explore that corner. (In angry response to elder daughter’s malevolent stare.) Or something ! Go ! ! (Over the top, the younger daughter babbles a convincing case for obeying.) Can’t you see how serious this is ! (Elder daughter trails her off, shoulders hunched.)



MAN, WOMAN


(Together.) But what has happened ? (She alone.) How did we leave with British passports… (He alone.) but they’re Polish ones when we come back. (Suddenly. Together.) Someone at the hotel !



BORDER OFFICIAL


(Shakes his head.) Let me explain it to you. (They nod. Baldly.) Do you remember that you decided – as you only had four months left to run on them – to renew your passports for this trip ?



MAN


Yes, but--- (The official puts his finger to his lips.)



BORDER OFFICIAL


Your wife had noticed that they were actually cheaper than a year ago (She nods.), and you thought it as well to renew them now, just in case (He nods.) – you both thought that it ‘made sense’.


(They both nod.)


WOMAN

But what’s this got… ? (Loudly.) I just want to go home to our house in Brent Pelham – and unpack our cases !



ELDER DAUGHTER

(Decides to join in. Calls out.) I’ve got to be back at six – Naomi’s calling for me. (Unfortunately for her, her sister has swept some things off a desk onto the floor, and is in more need of her attention.)


BORDER OFFICIAL

(Sternly.) Just listen to me. Who filled in the passport renewals ? (Man raises his hand.) And you read the guidance booklet ?


MAN

Yes, yes I did. (Hesitates.) Maybe not all of it, but I did. (Explains.) I had to.


BORDER OFFICIAL

What about the footnote to the footnote on page 38 ? (Man looks blank.) It says, in layman’s terms, that you need to tick the box underneath where you sign, in section 11, if you do not wish to retain British nationality. (Man looks sheepish, woman reproachful.)

People who tick that box get allocated to countries with ‘spare capacity’, and, again under the policies that you voted for, you then have to prove an extremely good reason to be allowed back into the UK.

(To the woman.) Did neither of you (To the man.) look at these passports, (Back to her.) along with your itinerary and other travel documents (Back to him.) before you made ready to go ?


MAN

(Shakes his head.)

Didn’t you even wonder why the colour of your passports was different, or they had a different crest on the front ? Too embarrassed by the photo… ?


MAN

(Pause. Disbelieving.) So you mean that our own country has kicked us out – given us a different nationality – in a country where we have no (Judders with each thought.) friends – job – family – school – home !


WOMAN

(Grief-stricken.) Oh, George – what have you done ! Was this because you skimped, and didn’t get the form checked at the post office ?!


MAN

(Ignores the accusation.) No… – wait a moment, she was a bit knowing at when I asked for the forms over the counter – said was I sure that… in case… I didn’t want more than one for each of us…


BORDER OFFICIAL

If you’d paid to have the forms checked, they would have been bound to ask you whether you no longer wanted to be British…

(Folds his arms. Sighs.) As it is…


WOMAN

(Not really believing all this.) But this is ridiculous ! When we voted not to have so many East Europeans here, we didn’t mean us !


BORDER OFFICIAL

Well, ma’am… (Momentary pause. Slightly condescendingly.) It’s not for me to say that no one learns lessons from history, but…


MAN

(With venom.) Oh, spare us your analysis of the origins of Kristallnacht ! (Official shrinks, for the first time thinking anything of his prey. Very loudly.) God, there must be some way through this Nonsense !! (To the woman.) Have you ever heard anything so crazy : they deem us no longer British because, on a form to renew a British passport, I tick some bloody stupid box that apparently says I’d rather be Croatian – or Czech !


BORDER OFFICIAL

Now that you put it like that, sir---


WOMAN

(With fury.) Yes, we do put it like that !


(Gesturing wildly, and overacting just a little bit.) We’re not about to let everything that we have be stolen – just because some dimwit government thought it a clever wheeze to let us leave the country, travelling on some gimcrack set of bogus papers !


BORDER OFFICIAL

Well---


MAN, WOMAN

(Together.) Aha ! (Man.) There’s nothing that you can say now, man – (Woman.) we know that your heart’s not in it !


BORDER OFFICIAL

(Sobs.) It’s true – I thought that I was better than this – tough as old boots. (Heaves his heart out.)


MAN

(Bracingly.) This is all very well, man, but pull yourself together –

(Gestures to the border.) or none of us will get out of here with honour.


BORDER OFFICIAL

(Self-pityingly.) You’re right, you’re right – it’s just that I thought that it would be a cinch to enforce these new rules…


WOMAN

Look, never mind that – we don’t want an apology, we---


ELDER DAUGHTER

(Calls out. To woman.) Look, I’m not even a registered child-minder, you know, and how much longer do I have to---


MAN

We’ll be with you in a minute – just stop Ruth playing with whatever she’s got in---


WOMAN

Wait a moment ! That’s the passports – we don’t want her eating those !


BORDER OFFICIAL

Don’t worry, ma’am. The passports are quite safe here (Gestures.), for what they’re worth, but… – do you mind if I see what she’s got ?


MAN, WOMAN

(Together.) Be my guest !


WOMAN

(Calls out. To elder daughter.) Go back and join your sister a moment. (To man.) He’s won over… but where do we go from here ?


BORDER OFFICIAL

(Returning.) Sir, what did you do with the old British passports when they were returned to you ? (Woman looks quizzical.) Put them somewhere safe ?


MAN

No, I don’t honestly remember seeing them – they didn’t come at the same time as (Gesturing at the Polish ones.) these.


WOMAN

(Uncertainly.) But didn’t Ruth ask if she could have them… ? And you said Yes, they were no use to us… ?


MAN

Yes, that’s possible…


BORDER OFFICIAL

I think that you’re right, ma’am, and that you did say so, sir. (Pause.) At any rate, your daughter must have put them in her bag before you went to Venice – and has just taken the opportunity to play with them (He waves them in the air.) now !


MAN, WOMAN

(Hesitantly.) Do you mean… ?


BORDER OFFICIAL

Yes, although they’ve been cancelled, I have a discretion to consider the unexpired portion of ‘your Britishness’ still valid, and, of course, I shall !


WOMAN

(Approaching the daughters with the man. To elder daughter.) Come, Abigail – we need to get back for that lift---


MAN

(To younger daughter. Catching her up in his arms.) And you, Ruth, can have that pony thing you’ve been wanting !


They re-join the official, and shake hands and exchange hugs all around.


BORDER OFFICIAL

Take care of these, now, and book an appointment with your MP as soon as you can – if you’ve got a good one, they’ll want to know all about it, sir, ma’am ! (He leads them back to the border, and lets them through.)

(As they walk away. Shakes head.) I’m just too soft-hearted, me – they were Polish, bang to rights !



ENDS

© Copyright Belston Night Works 2013







Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday, 19 May 2014

An edited review of Dennis Russell Davies conducting Pärt, Glass and Adams in Cambridge

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
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19 May




At full strength, Basel Symphony Orchestra has fifty string-players. Cambridge Corn Exchange has had many a huge orchestra occupy its stage, but it has probably never before entertained a programme comprising works such as those by Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass and John Adams in its regular concert series, as it did on Sunday 27 April – and rarely under a conductor as distinguished in his field as Dennis Russell Davies.

Whatever the three composers featured may have in common (Pärt, at least, rejects the popular description of minimalism), there is assuredly more that makes each one distinctive, as this review hopes to show.



Arvo Pärt – These Words…

This short piece was composed at the end of the last decade, and apparently (according to the publishers) uses material from a Slavonic Prayer, as well as alluding to Hamlet. The reference is not made explicit, but, just before the scene with the play performed by the theatrical troupe, Hamlet’s uncle Claudius says to him I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. (Act 3, Scene 2).

With the connivance of the leader of the players, Hamlet had interpolated the text with material designed to bring out guilty behaviour in Claudius. Yet afterwards, when Hamlet confronts his mother Gertrude, she says O, speak to me no more! These words like daggers enter in my ears. No more, sweet Hamlet. (Act 3, Scene 4).

All of these works employ percussion in a persuasive way. In These Words…, it is triangle, xylophone (marimba ?), cymbals, drums, and bell-sounds (not obviously tubular-bells), and, with them, strings. After a beginning filled with suspense, Pärt sets out his thematic material in the percussion instruments, and then introduces the bell-notes, with a descending interval between them.

With, at times, an oriental feel to the writing, he moves between plucked and bowed strings, evoking a sense of eeriness in the ensemble, and returning to the contrasting bell-notes, letting the second one sing – and then a pause / silence in which it lingers as part of the music. So is a fade to almost nothing, after which, in the spirit of Pierre Boulez, he puts the xylophone / marimba into the texture, not as an interjection, but an inner statement.

We seem to be tracing a very slow, but clear, life-sign, with the music conforming to its own measure. The strings swell, then diminish – momentarily (no more than a bar or two), the material has a different rhythm, then it ends, again with the sound of the bell. An excellent choice to open the concert !


Here, it is essential that the gesture of sounding a bell is germane and has poise : Davies so works with orchestras that the atmosphere that Pärt is seeking is wholly present. Likewise, a large group of strings bows together, yet playing piano, with the density of the texture, but not the immediacy of the sound.



Philip Glass – Cello Concerto No. 2 (‘Naqoyqatsi’)

Four times, Philip Glass has worked with director Godfrey Reggio on a film (the latest being Visitors (2013)), and turned the score for the previous film, Naqoyqatsi (2002) into his seven-movement Cello Concerto No. 2, thus subtitled.

Davies has recorded the work with the same soloist, Matt Haimovitz, but conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Its movements all have titles, which may be those of cues from the film’s score, but they are not always self explanatory.

The concert performance had a moment of additional drama in that, at around the end of the sixth movement, one of Haimovitz’s strings – under a lot of pressure – broke. With aplomb and a string from a fellow cellist to hand, he effected the repair there and then in front of us, whilst Davies stood guard over the mood of the piece…

As mentioned, percussion is important in these pieces, but Glass also writes for tam-tam, struck cymbals, wood-blocks, and snare-drum : as the percussionists were at the back, and largely standing, one had a perfect view of what they were adding to the sound, and how carefully. In addition, the concerto is scored for harp, bassoon, horns, and other brass.


1. Naqoyqatsi
Strings and ‘parping’ horns open the work, before the soloist enters with intense drums and cymbals, and weighty cellos / double-basses. Straightaway, Haimovitz demonstrated a lovely sound with the ensemble, his part encompassing a variety of moods, including yearning.

A feature is the shifting tonality, and a tutti section features tubular-bell, and thrilling modulations. Later, cellos alone, then with basses, bring what is almost a trademark of Glass’ music : with, for want of a better term, circle-sounds, he does not literally inscribe a circle with complementary pairs of descending triplets, but it feels like it. He ends the movement with low-register cellos, joined by basses, brass, and percussion.


2. Massman
The second movement had Haimovitz playing sharpened notes, a tremolo effect, and even, later, quarter-tones. The orchestra interjects tutti, but overall that it feels a little like a trudge. Glass then writes high for the cello, and, with percussion giving an oom-pah effect, he momentarily seems to parody Shokstakovich’s own ‘ironic’ parodies. High-energy tutti, rich in brass, herald ‘circle-sounds’ again – now with a slightly sickening feel to the solo part. Before Haimovitz ended, at the bottom of his register, we had a fleeting evocation of Viennese style.


3 – 5. New World / Intensive Times / Old World

Taking these movements together, as they feel linked, we find (3) that tam-tam beats lead to suggestive solo-writing, resembling a gypsy fiddler. Now resembling a solo cello with an orchestra behind him, Haimowitz evoked not only tuning the instrument and the Bach solo cello Suites, but also harmonics, slide-notes, and ghostly tremolos by the cello’s bridge. Next (4), prominent tutti passages, featuring wood-blocks and snare-drum, which leads to haunting brass-writing in its ‘peachy’ register, accompanied by struck cymbals.

The movement develops to vary between driving inevitability and harmonic uncertainty, but bedding down before the end. Finally, (5), as with New World, another opening with the soloist - high, aetherial lines, followed by harp chiming in with an emerging phrase by sounding a descending interval. Generally, the movement feels similar to New World, but instead exploiting a rising interval.


6. Point Blank
A bouncy, but sinister, theme opens the movement, coarsened by a rasp from the brass. Yet it develops by seeming to pitch a descending minor third against a rising major third (?) from the soloist, with lurking snare-drum rhythms. After tutti sections, Haimowitz had writing that demanded intense slurring and sawing. Adamsian ‘Circle-sounds’ follow, but are undercut by descending, sneering brass and strings. Though the cello reaches out, it simultaneously feels constrained by brass and percussion, and ends meditating on one note.


7. The Vivid Unknown (when the broken string was being replaced, described by Davies as ‘the epilogue’)
The movement opens with a very expansive theme for solo cello, which, whilst it generally strives upwards, moves downwards. Cellos and basses contribute ‘circle-sounds’ as the cello has a vivid outpouring, only brought back to earth by the violins’ purity. The bassoon, there in the general texture, makes a weighty contribution, which gives way to more solo material. The bassoons then contributed, with a rising interval (a third ?), and, on beats from the tam-tam – in conjunction, with the other percussion ¬– the concerto came to an end.


The concerto’s origins may mean that the movements are necessarily more delineated than, say, in the work by John Adams after the interval : several began with the soloist introducing thematic material, or of a different character. Haimowitch gave a highly engaged performance. He had hesitated about premiering the work, but Glass had assured him that repeated matter could be varied according to context and his judgement.

All in all, with Pärt and Glass, a good first half, and one that introduced a post-modern approach to compositions that explore the dimensions of a small chosen realm in depth, but without much of the vividly atonal or even twelve-tone approaches that many composers of the last forty or fifty years have embraced.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Six short films from Watersprite 2014

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19 May

This is a review of a screening at the bar of The Arts Picturehouse of the top films from Watersprite (the international festival for student film-makers, @WaterspriteCam) – it fell in two parts, the first being on Monday 12 May 2014


1. Wind [link to the film on Vimeo]

Much has been written about this inventive film already by TAKE ONE, which covered the Watersprite Festival. As with the one that followed at this screening, it plays with being the wrong side of safe, and some have said that it is about adapting to extreme conditions.

Yet, although one can have a stylized haircut that depends on the wind blowing, one gets one’s nose cut off, it is not. The adaptation itself seems to be to something that is of these people’s own making, for we see shifts being changed at the plant where the wind is being generated, and where the outgoing worker has had time to grow a lengthy beard before being relieved : a symbolic depiction, but we need reminding that we sometimes create a problem, sometimes psychologically, and then learn to live with it, rather than seeking a proper solution.



2. Border Patrol [link to the film’s IMDb page]

This is a story that does not quite take one where it might, when it has the potential of the older officer Franz having ‘got one over’ on his dismissive younger colleague Carl, but instead settling on a relatively modest and benign punch-line (if at the cost of an unfortunate victim).

It is well resourced and acted, and there is tension, but director Peter Baumann seems to have reckoned that the latter is dissipated by the film ending as it does, whereas it really ends as a sick comment on people in authority passing the buck (and at the expense of the person who suffered).



3. Echo [link to a ‘teaser trailer’ on Vimeo]

There was disagreement, following the screening, whether Caroline ends, through having cried wolf, in a different place from where she began. Even if she did, it is not obvious enough that she is not just ‘up to her old tricks’, and they are really what is more interesting, for she reminds of Jeune et Jolie (2013)’s Isabelle (Marine Vacth) in acting / seeming to act immorally.

At first, Caroline appears to be the one in danger, because she has strewn the contents of her bag on the floor and we fear that she may come to regret being so trusting. As things develop, and, when she is at home, it is clear that her mother had no message from her, it seems like a scam on her part, but maybe one to which she is addicted as Isabelle is. It turns out to be rooted in truth, whatever weight the ending bears : is Caroline, as Lady Macbeth does, repeating the distressing experience over again, because she can do nothing else, and not for gain ?



* * * * *



4. How to Count Sheep [link to the trailer on Vimeo]

After the interval came what felt the least effective film – not for the visual quality, or for the imagery of such moments (which spoke volumes) of tracks going towards and right up to a tree (a disappearance seemed implied, rather than a tree-climbing sheep), but for the lack of overall coherence.

Maybe it came from being in the invidious position of the first after the break, when concentration was not at its greatest, but it never seemed to come together to say something : was it life striving to imitate dreams, or dreams that were too rooted in the over-worked idiom of the folklore of going to sleep – or did we, despite its title, mistake, if we though that it had either aim in mind ? The title may simply have been an over-reaching claim, for it seemed like exploring being awake, but with a forced notion of what dream and its elements are…



5. Born Positive [link to the trailer on Vimeo]

Forget who mimes best to the real voices*, who have been disguised by having actors stand in for them : this is a powerful piece of film-making, well edited and treating of the three stand-in actors together and individually. It is a way of engaging with people who want to speak, but remain hidden, that proves very impressive here, not just because of the subject-matter.

At first, the three actors are on a roof-top space together (as can be seen in the trailer, talking in turns (and a place to which we return)), and we become used to them as a group with the unfamiliarity that this face is not really speaking these words – though all that links those speaking is having found out that HIV had been passed on to them (and the film ends with remarkable figures about how low the incidence now is amongst babies born to mothers in the UK with HIV).

One suspects that no more than with exact age that the ethnic origin may not have been kept the same as that of the speaker, to add a greater level of making the voices difficult to recognize, for Zachariah Fletcher (as Mark) did not sound as he looked, and Trevon Paddy (as Blake) seems older as an actor than the role that he was playing. The important thing about the film is, of course, what it tells us, but that it has Zachariah owning an outdoor location gives a vividness to what his character is telling us.

Blaming others for what happened, then finding, with reflection, that maybe they had guessed at what they did not know when a parent had not been around to ask, and working out how to tell others that they have HIV, and who needs to know – these strong questions that people ask about themselves and their identity in all sorts of contexts have a special poignancy in the context of statistics given at the end.



6. A Man Came From The Sea [link to the film at The University of York]

This was another film that seemed less strong : it is preceded by the incongruity of a tango reconstructed in arrangement (score by Kattguldet), a cynical evaluation by the well-played pair who find The Man unconscious, and a beautiful location, but – unless it meant to draw attention to itself – also a title-song in no way as convincing as those are in The Wicker Man (1973).

Here, because there was not the uncertainty inherent in How To Count Sheep, it was evident that the plot was wafer thin, dwelling on the theme of the refugee, and what makes, or does not make, someone worth while in the eyes of those who do not know him or her : not a skit on Yorkshire hospitality, but on all forces that will have someone ‘sent back’ because his or her ‘story’ has been discredited (albeit in an impressive long shot, and to what is now the stridency of tango-writing).

Unfortunately, the political staginess of a man made welcome and as soon rejected, was matched by the inevitability of what happened. With opening and closing sequences so long (1:23 and 1:34, respectively, out of an overall 10:28), and so no time for conflict where we might feel something more for this man with Scandinavian tones, we might just condemn the instance, but can overlook it as happening there – as if it could never happen / does not happen here.


End-notes

* After all, there must have been some matching of lip-movements to the target audio in the editing process. (One may also fear for the speakers that, from his or her voice alone, someone might know who he or she is, and so know things about him or her that were only being shared anonymously – one hopes not…)



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Saturday, 17 May 2014

Unaltered appreciation

This is a review of Advanced Style (2014)

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17 May

This is a review of Advanced Style (2014)


One does not immediately place the phrase, but the title of Lina Plioplyte's film (and of Ari Seth Cohen’s book, which gave rise to it, and his blog before it) plays upon the hackneyed words 'at [my / your, etc.] advanced age'.

The film tells the story of the older women whom Cohen made it his project, after he had been advised to come to New York City to find his inspiration, to feature on his blog (and we see him approaching new candidates on the street) : although he is present a fair bit to help the ones whom he featured earlier on ‘manage’ what is happening, it is their story, and nothing in this Dogwoof documentary takes away from that.

In several cases, these well-dressed women on the street already had their own boutiques, which featured the fashions that they liked and which they wanted to preserve for others to buy, whereas others had been models in earlier times, but the thing that they had in common was enjoying wearing the clothes out and about and them being seen, which is where Cohen had found them.

With a little help from his blog and then from the resultant book, things had begun to happen in the fashion world, with t.v. appearances and modelling work. Although each showed taste, self-belief and talent, probably each of us will have a favourite for her look and what she aspires to, whether Tziporah Salamon, showing off her clothes on her bicycle, or Ilona Smithkin, teaching art, and making her own eyelashes.

Maybe the colour balance had been slightly shifted so that the functional establishing street-shots shone less than the scenes, full of colour, when outfits were bursting out of the screen. However, the whole choice of foils to the moments of flowering of fashion was equally a very good one, and the film also pulled no punches in addressing rivalry, disability and decline.

The connection and caring between these women, with their sense of style, was the most heartening, alongside seeing them gain recognition that they may not have expected : they are, of course, a paradigm for people of all kinds who may no longer be seen for who they are or what they can do, but who are there to be recognized…








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