Old Yorker

  • Morvern Callar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lynne Ramsay (2002)

    Every so often, someone from BFI’s ‘Futures’ initiative pops up at a screening to invite those in the audience aged twenty-five or under to attend a discussion of the film afterwards.  In one recent instance, a show of hands beforehand revealed unfortunately few eligible audience members but that wasn’t a problem at Morvern Callar.  Matt somebody, from the ‘Futures’ steering group, enlarged the usual invitation with advice on how to watch Lynne Ramsay’s film.  He informed us that the title character, who works in a supermarket, hadn’t previously been considered in terms of her social class.  This, said Matt, was because of Ramsay’s trademark ‘poetic aesthetic’ and the perceived similarity of her work to that of the German writer-director Angela Schanelec, which ‘often features middle-class characters’.  Matt wanted people, young ones anyway, to compare and contrast their ‘empathy’ with a working-class character like Morvern with what they would feel about a middle-class character, though he didn’t specify what kind of middle-class character he had in mind.  Or explain, if Ramsay’s protagonist has been viewed purely as an element in her ‘poetic aesthetic’, how BFI came to be showing Morvern Callar in their ‘Working Class Heroes’ season (alongside Billy Liar, Charlie Bubbles, Poor Cow, and so on).

    Matt didn’t convince me ‘Futures’ is in safe hands but what he said about Lynne Ramsay’s aesthetic and about empathy are certainly relevant to watching her films.  Ramsay’s priorities are ingenious image-making and sound design to the extent that she creates a considerable emotional distance between the viewer and the people on the screen.  Her characters aren’t necessarily alienating but the effect of Ramsay’s artfulness is to eclipse them.  She has made four features, of which I’ve now seen three (I’m still missing the first, Ratcatcher).  I can’t offhand think of another current director in whose work people are more clearly subordinate to the visual scheme in which she (or he) places them.  Except that Ramsay also has a knack – probably the wrong word:  this must be calculated – of casting a lead actor strong enough to break through, at least intermittently, her barrier of technique:  Tilda Swinton in We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here (2017), Samantha Morton in Morvern Callar.

    Like both her subsequent features, this one is adapted from someone else’s novel.  Ramsay shares the screenplay credit with Liana Dognini.  In the original Morvern Callar (Alan Warner’s debut novel), the heroine is Scottish.  In the film, she’s English:  in a phone conversation early on, Morton’s Morvern acknowledges that she’s not a local but has lived for some years in the Scottish town where the story is primarily set.  She has (from what I could hear) no backstory beyond this.

    Morvern wakes on Christmas morning to find that her boyfriend James has killed himself.  In the note left on his computer screen, he says suicide seemed to make sense and tells Morvern that he loves her.  He asks her to make funeral arrangements:  there’s enough money in his bank account.  He also bequeaths the manuscript of a novel he’s written, along with instructions to Morvern to send it to publishers in a prescribed order.  Instead of organising a funeral, Morvern cuts up and buries James’s body.  (No one seems to miss him anyway.)  She erases ‘James Gillespie’ from the first page of the manuscript and replaces it with her own name, before sending the novel to the first publisher on James’s list.  There’s approaching four thousand pounds in his bank account.  Morvern quits her job stacking supermarket shelves and arranges a holiday with her friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott) on the Costa del Sol.  Shortly before leaving for Spain, Morvern receives a letter:  the firm she sent ‘her’ book to wants to publish it.

    Talk about beginner’s luck.  Morvern Callar, in other words, is not a realistic story, even though Lynne Ramsay sets it in a physically real (and bleak) world and Matt’s introduction mentioned that Morvern had ‘to deal with grief from the outset’.  It’s difficult to interpret her behaviour as an expression of grief not just because the grieving takes such an unconventional form but also thanks to the dominance and distraction of Ramsay’s visual effects.  It was a particular difficulty for this viewer that among the most salient of these are the Christmas tree lights that keep flickering off and on (and on and on) beside James’s corpse.  With plenty of later sequences in strobe-lit clubs, in both Scotland and Spain, I admit I missed a fair part of Morvern Callar shielding my eyes.  But not enough to avoid finding the film boring:  even though Ramsay’s compositions are extraordinary (the DP is Alwin H Küchler), her way of working is predictable enough to nullify this.  Morvern says to Lanna, ‘Let’s bake!’  What she really means is:  let’s bake but first shower ourselves in flour so that we’re suitably eye-catching.

    Throughout all this, Samantha Morton, while in no position to create a character, is an intriguing presence.  Once the action shifts to Spain and the locations there change relatively quickly, Morvern experiences a sense of freedom and so does the actress playing her.  The publishers are so keen to recruit Morvern that they hotfoot it to Almeria to talk terms with her.  The interview that follows is mildly enjoyable comedy (‘It’s great to read a novel with a distinctive new female voice …’).  Morvern leaves Lanna stranded somewhere in the mountains but there’s no hard feelings on the latter’s part once she’s made her own way back to Scotland.  The post awaiting Morvern there includes a £100,000 cheque from the publishers as an advance on the novel.  She decides to leave town and urges Lanna to come too, though she already knows her friend lacks her sense of adventure.  The film ends with a beautiful shot of Morvern alone on a railway platform, about to board the train that will take her into a new world.

    As might be expected, Morvern Callar is:

    ‘… an interesting film from a feminist perspective, not simply because it is directed and written by women and has two female protagonists, but more so, because the main female character is not judged or punished for her transgressions … Morvern Callar overturns this dynamic and explores the possibility of an ethics beyond judgment. Morvern’s affective, tactile and sensory way of experiencing the world articulates an idea of life as experimental and open to the new rather than contained and restricted by fixed transcendent codes and rules.  By aligning the film-viewer with Morvern’s affective and tactile way of experiencing the world it introduce [sic] us to an immanent ethics and aesthetics that avoids moral judgments and relates to idea [sic] of life as open and vital.’

    That’s what Teresa Rizzo, an Honorary Associate and researcher in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney, says anyway.   She’s probably right but I didn’t feel aligned to Morvern’s etc etc.   The world I was experiencing was the world of a Lynne Ramsay film.  And a Lynne Ramsay film is The Lynne Ramsay Show.

    25 September 2018

  • Two Gentlemen Sharing

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ted Kotcheff (1969)

    Two Gentlemen Sharing, part of BFI’s ‘Black and Banned: The Films You Weren’t Allowed to See’ season, was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1969 and in the US, Australia and Sweden later that year or during 1970.  It never saw the light of day in the UK, where it was ‘[allegedly] considered an incitement to race-riot’ (BFI).  Even though that sounds laughably unlikely, this absorbing film is so confusing that audiences would no doubt have taken very different messages from it – and perhaps that’s what rattled the censor.  The theatrical release poster, reproduced in the film’s Wikipedia entry, has a tagline ‘What does a chap do when he can’t make up his mind?’   The question turns out to refer to two indecisive chaps, the protagonist Roddy Pater (Robin Phillips) and the other main male character Andrew McKenzie (Hal Frederick).  But the director Ted Kotcheff can’t make his mind up either.

    If you were told simply that the BBFC had judged a 1960s film called Two Gentlemen Sharing too hot to handle, you might assume it was about gay men.  You’d be wrong and right.  When Andrew answers Roddy’s advertisement for someone to share his rented Knightsbridge flat and visits the property, Roddy mentions that he went to a not very good public school:  ‘Homosexuality at reduced prices,’ he jokes.  This prompts Andrew to ask if he’s queer; Roddy, shocked, replies in the negative; Andrew says affably that it’s best to be clear from the outset.  Roddy is white and works in advertising; Andrew is black – Jamaican-born, Oxford-educated (as is Roddy) and looking to start a legal career.  What follows is a predominantly racial drama that never quite shakes off the spectre of Roddy’s sexual inhibitions, which emerge in his relationship with a girl called Jane (Judy Geeson).  She’s white but lives in a largely West Indian neighbourhood of London, was raised by a black stepfather and socialises with Caribbean immigrants.  Ted Kotcheff encourages us to wonder if an amalgam of racial prejudice and social snobbery is what’s stopping Roddy from making out with Jane.  Then, in the film’s final scene, Marcus (Ram John Holder), a flamboyantly gay West Indian, tries to seduce a drunken Roddy, who angrily – but anxiously – rebuffs him.  In the film’s closing shot, Roddy stares into the camera, as if forced finally to confront the sexual identity he’s been denying.

    If Roddy is in two minds about his sexuality, Andrew is ambivalent about his cultural allegiance and future.  With his pinstripe suit, bowler hat and upper-class accent, he’s exaggeratedly English (to that extent, a kind of forerunner of the super-civilised black lodger in the 1970s TV sitcom Rising Damp).  But Andrew wears the trappings of Englishness almost sarcastically:  he’s acutely and furiously aware of the racism that makes it difficult for him to get a flat-share in a nice area and which will surely exclude him from the legal establishment he’s academically qualified to enter.  To add insult to injury, the English weather is terrible:  Andrew insists he’ll soon be heading back to the Caribbean.  His girlfriend Caroline (Esther Anderson) – a model, from a middle-class family in Jamaica – has a more sanguine attitude to life in Swinging London.  Andrew is both hurt and vindicated when Roddy’s landlady Mrs Ashby-Kydd (Rachel Kempson) evicts him in a torrent of racial abuse.  When he’s offered a job interview with a high-profile partnership in the City, Caroline and Roddy persuade him to go for it.  Andrew arrives for the interview; he’s so oppressed by the portraits of dead white men covering the walls that he quickly makes for the exit.  Out on the street, he formally hands over his bowler and umbrella to a bewildered City gent.

    The narrative style and tone keep changing, which may be down to Evan Jones’ screenplay (adapted from a novel by David Stuart Leslie) as much as Ted Kotcheff’s direction.   In the early stages, when Andrew has first moved in with Roddy, there’s a fair amount of broad comedy.  Whether intentionally or not, this reinforces racial stereotypes   Roddy comes in late one evening to hear conversation between Caroline and Andrew going on in the latter’s room – ‘Let me come to you – harder, harder’, etc.  The camera moves through the wall to reveal Andrew practising cricket shots, with Caroline bowling to him.  This is followed by an actual cricket match, in which Andrew takes part along with Gary Sobers and the English fast bowler John Snow – virtually as themselves.  Snow has no more luck bowling to Oxford cricket blue Andrew than to Sobers (who’d achieved his famous six-sixes-in-one-over in an English county cricket match in August 1968).  You’d never guess from this demonstration of the relative merits of Caribbean and English cricketers that Snow, according to the start of his Wikipedia entry, is ‘known for bowling England to victory against the West Indies in 1967-68’.  Roddy, needless to say, is a mere spectator at the match.  It all makes for a white men can’t jump scenario, translated from the basketball court to the cricket pitch.

    At the start of the film, Roddy has a cartoon posh girlfriend, Ethne (Hilary Dwyer).  When she isn’t riding to hounds, she’s fighting off Roddy’s attentions on the sofa.  Her no-sex-please-we’re-Britishness deflects attention from what may be the root cause of his sexual under-performance.  He parts company with Ethne after meeting Jane, when he and his ad-man work colleague Phil (Norman Rossington) accompany Andrew and Caroline to a Caribbean jump-up in what looks like a town hall.  (There’s a nice touch at the end of the evening when the steel band plays ‘God Save the Queen’.)   Jane instantly both takes a liking to and distrusts Roddy.  The tension in their exchanges is (and continues to be) rather gripping but Jane’s class and cultural background are a distracting puzzle.  From the way Judy Geeson speaks, Jane could be middle-class, though her mother (Shelagh Fraser) sounds Cockney and Jane is not the sort to put on airs.  Her biological parents were both white:  after her father died when Jane was a baby, her mother married Jamaican Charles (Earl Cameron).  Jane is firmly rooted in the local Caribbean community in which she was brought up, going to West Indian dances and working as a hairdresser at a salon with a black clientele.  Yet from what he tells Roddy, on his one visit to the family home, Charles never wanted Jane to feel obliged to stay put in this way.

    Ted Kotcheff (a Canadian) handles contradictions of English class more surely in an episode where Roddy takes his friends for the weekend to his family home, a decaying country mansion.  His parents (David Markham and Avice Landon) live in near-squalor, with a lot of cats but without now being able to afford domestic help.  Roddy’s party includes Jane, Andrew, Caroline, Phil and Amanda (Daisy Mae Williams), a blonde-wigged black sexpot whom Phil got friendly with at the jump-up.  Along with the bedroom comedy supplied by these two and the bedroom angst of Roddy and Jane, there are economical, trenchant illustrations of racial discrimination in Andrew’s brief encounter with Roddy’s father.  The latter appears in the entrance hall as Andrew is admiring an antique vase.   ‘Would you mind putting that down, please?’ is all Mr Pater has to say to him.  It doesn’t help that Roddy, standing beside Andrew, can’t bring himself to introduce his black friend to his father.

    The climax to Two Gentlemen Sharing is a party, hosted by Roddy, when his affair with Jane is all but over.  She’s at the party but all the other guests are black:  this seems to be Roddy’s awkward, desperate attempt to insist on his colour-blindness, as well as recapture the atmosphere of his first meeting with Jane.   By now, the film’s mood has soured into a picture of romantic and race relations dead ends.  Andrew hasn’t got a job but he’s still in London:  at Roddy’s party, he’s in conversation with a Black Power supporter and scathingly contemptuous of the latter’s point of view.  Roddy, as he gets drunk, makes a clumsy, hopeless pass at a black girl, as well as conclusively alienating Jane.   After Marcus has made his move on Roddy, the police arrive, in response to complaints about the noise in the flat.  Roddy tells everyone to leave and is left to his own misery.

    The film perpetuates its own kind of racial discrimination in its exposure of black vs white flesh.  In particular, Ted Kotcheff seems keen to demonstrate that Andrew, for all his justified hang-ups about his ethnicity, can rest assured that, as a black man, he’s not only great at sex and cricket but has a body worth showing off.  Whereas Robin Phillips takes nearly the whole film even to remove his shirt in bed, Hal Frederick is repeatedly topless and briefly bottomless at the same time.  The one white bum bared to the camera is Norman Rossington’s – the culmination of the director’s determination to condemn Phil as a merely ridiculous lech.  (I felt sorry for Rossington, who seizes his few opportunities to show other sides to the character:  Phil‘s jovial racist remarks have a particularly nasty bite.)   We’re primed, of course, to expect a man who works in advertising to be nothing more than a vain egotist:  Roddy is an exception to the rule only because he expresses a low opinion of his line of work.  Robin Phillips’s stiff, impacted interpretation of the main character is certainly effective in keeping the viewer guessing whether this is a repressed racist, a repressed homosexual or just an uptight upper-middle-class Englishman.  Phillips may well be acting with extraordinary skill and subtlety but he’s uncomfortable to watch.  Besides, if Roddy is as personally screwed-up as Phillips makes him seem and as Two Gentlemen Sharing‘s final moments confirm, he’s severely attenuated as representative of typical contemporary racial attitudes.  What does this film mean to say?

    23 September 2018

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