Old Yorker

  • Christine (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Christine (1987) + Road (1987)

    (Alan Clarke)

    A double bill in BFI’s Alan Clarke season, Christine and Road were both originally screened in 1987 in the BBC’s Screenplay slot.  The two pieces are different in many ways but a shared feature and strength of them is the dynamism of sequences in which people walk across the screen with a handheld camera in close attendance.  The walking looks purposeful even though, in most cases, the character’s destination hardly vindicates that sense of purpose.

    This is the only strong element of Christine, in which the thirteen-year-old title character (Vicky Murdock) tramps round a suburban estate, like a kid district nurse, dispensing and partaking of heroin.  (The street signs feature the names of Lake Poets, which connects the estate rather strangely with the one on which Reggie Perrin lived.)  Christine’s main port of call is the house where her friend Eddie (Kelly George) is staying with his married brother and sister-in-law, both of whom are out at work.  The youngsters exchange small talk before injecting themselves, which they do with a mixture of concentration and indifference.  The play, written by Clarke and Arthur Ellis, doesn’t build, except in the sense that Christine’s routine may alarm the viewer and that routine is repeated.  The adolescents on the screen aren’t actors to any noticeable degree.  They’re cast for a particular look – just the one.  When they speak, the surface realness of the film is undermined by their clumsy readings:  they sound like actual people only to the extent that they’re actual teenagers trying and failing to act naturally.  We soon get the point that the kids’ lives are meagre, the kids are affectless and Alan Clarke is eschewing dramatic incident.  Christine lasts only fifty-two minutes but that’s a long enough time in which to convey and achieve boringness.

    Road is something else, a sixty-two minute adaptation of Jim Cartwright’s stage play, which started life at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1986.  The actors are drawn from the first two Royal Court casts:  not the least interest of the piece comes from seeing in their early or mid-twenties people who’ve since gone on to lasting screen careers – David Thewlis, Jane Horrocks, Neil Dudgeon, Lesley Sharp.  The contemporary political context is sharper in Road than in Christine.  The working-class characters in Jim Cartwright’s play live in a deprived area of Lancashire, in the heart of Thatcher’s Britain. (The kids on heroin in Christine are not poor:  we’re meant to assume they get hold of drugs using their own pocket money.)  Alan Clarke doesn’t attempt to disguise Road’s theatre origins and substance.  These are increasingly salient in the physical arrangement of characters on the screen, the audience-confronting monologues, the choruses.  But the piece is powerfully – and humorously – kinetic:  when the suited-up Brink (Dudgeon) and Eddie (William Armstrong) march out at the start of their evening; when a desperate-for-sex middle-aged woman (Susan Brown) totters down the street in pursuit of a young soldier (Tim Dantay) even drunker than she is; when Brink and Eddie head back with the girls they’ve paired up with – Louise (Horrocks) and Carol (Mossie Smith) seem to take a half-dozen steps for every one taken by the men.

    The first of these sequences is scored to the Nolans’ ‘I’m in the Mood for Dancing’ and sets the pattern for the imaginative soundtrack.  Song lyrics are matched, with a measure of irony, to the images on the screen but the numbers aren’t only apt in this way:  the music in them also fits with the emotional energy (and sometimes conflict) of the scene in which they feature.  This is especially true of Clarke’s bravura staging of a down-the-pub ensemble, accompanied by Mel and Kim’s ‘Respectable’, and of the Otis Redding cover of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’, which Eddie puts on a cassette player, when Louise and Carol have gone back with him and Brink to a derelict house.  The use of noise in competition with music – a vacuum cleaner versus a transistor radio, and so on – is effective too.  Road was shot on location, in and around the former coal-mining town of Easington in County Durham, but Alan Clarke and Stuart Walker, his gifted designer, poise the look of the piece between realism and expressionism.

    The suicide of Joey (Thewlis) and his woebegone girlfriend Clare (Moya Brady) is presented as a natural conclusion to the poverty and ill health in which they’re trapped.   A more interesting convergence of the characters’ sexual needs and anger with the larger indigence of their lives is expressed in the succession of monologues, from Eddie, Brink, Louise and Carol, which form the climax to Road.  All four actors are impressive here – although he’s now less well known than the other three, William Armstrong more than holds his own.

    Another remarkable monologue is the one spoken by Lesley Sharp’s character Valerie, who makes a single appearance in the film and – always on the move – talks bitterly about her miserable marriage.  Sharp’s delivery of the monologue is a determined tour de force, although it has the effect of drawing attention to the rhythms of Jim Cartwright’s writing and away from the character.  In spite of the fact that Valerie is always looking down, Sharp is also one of the more camera-conscious performers in Road.  The most camera-conscious, and intentionally so, is Andrew Wilde, in the small but memorable role of Louise’s grease-monkey brother.  He appears at the very start, daubing his sister’s face with motor oil when she’s finished doing her make-up and is all ready to go out.   As she runs upstairs to start all over again, the (unnamed) brother looks straight at the viewer and bellows.  There are no words, only a noise, but the message is clear.  Pretending to startle us – for a laugh – but at the same time meaning to, he wants to know ‘What you staring at??’

    30 April 2016

  • Once Upon a Time in the Midlands

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Shane Meadows (2002)

    This feels like very early Shane Meadows – there are good things in it but the tone is uncertain.   The title nods to Sergio Leone and the film includes Western parody elements.  It could be summarised as the story of a good guy and a bad guy competing for the same girl.  There are repeated shots of a suburban street that give it a mildly ominous look – as if it’s shaping up as the venue for a shoot-out.  In fact not a shot is fired in Once Upon a Time in the Midlands although an inept robbery in the early stages is crucial to the plot.  (The small-time crooks who dominated Meadows’ shorts and first feature are very persistent in his work.)   John Lunn’s score is a skilful, amusing pastiche of Ennio Morricone but Meadow overuses it – and it’s so clearly pastiche that it tends to put the action in quotation marks.  Juxtaposing the lushly melodramatic music and what appears on screen has the effect of almost ridiculing the conflicts of the characters because of their mundane setting – which can’t have been what Meadows intended.  It came as a surprise, after I’d watched Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, to discover that it was made as recently as 2002 – three years after A Room for Romeo Brass.

    On a daytime TV show hosted by Vanessa Feltz (as herself), Dek, who works in a garage, proposes to his girlfriend Shirley:  she’s so genuinely overwhelmed that she turns him down.   This is only the start of Dek’s run of bad luck;  Shirley’s former boyfriend Jimmy, the father of her daughter Marlene, wakes up in his Glasgow flat to see the show.  He then goes out to join his three mates in the attempted robbery of a group of clowns (including Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, unrecognisable under painted faces and bald-curly wigs).  Jimmy finds himself alone with the cash proceeds of the theft and hitches a lift down to the Midlands to look out Shirley and reclaim her and Marlene.  The performances aren’t as well orchestrated as in later Meadows.   This was his first opportunity, thanks presumably to the success of Romeo Brass, to work with well-known actors from outside his usual line-up – the main roles are played by Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, Shirley Henderson, Kathy Burke and Ricky Tomlinson.  You might expect most of that group to work well with Meadows but not all of them do.  The way they speak is a superficial part of the problem.   The actors use more or less their own accents:  one gets so used to hearing the East Midlands in Shane Meadows’ films that the range of these accents is rather dislocating – with Glaswegian (Carlyle), Welsh (Ifans), London (Burke) and Lancashire (Tomlinson) so much in evidence, the place seems to have been invaded by aliens.   Because the invaders are actors not previously in the Meadows stable they seem all the more alien.

    There are more fundamental problems, though, with Robert Carlyle and Rhys Ifans.  Carlyle hasn’t the greatest sense of humour – his angry, swearing Jimmy isn’t likeable or even vividly dislikeable.  (In Carlyle’s best performance – on television, as the crazed Liverpool FC fan in Cracker in 1994 – his character stabbed the young police detective played by Christopher Eccleston, an actor who’s turned out to take himself even more seriously than Carlyle.  The murder was shocking at the time:  in retrospect, the collision of Carlyle and Eccleston seems, because of their shared miserablist tendencies, almost comical.)  Rhys Ifans tries but he’s too clumsy an actor to give Dek the complexity needed.  This is a role which you suspect Meadows and his co-writer Paul Fraser conceived with Paddy Considine in mind.  You miss Considine in sequences like those in which Dek pretends to be a tough guy and convinces no one, including himself.  I think Considine might have played these scenes so as to make you feel Dek believed that he was convincing others of his machismo.  Rhys Ifans just seems to be making fun of the character – the comical malapropisms and mispronunciations that Meadows has presumably encouraged make things worse.

    For much of Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, the pleasures are minor and incidental:  sharp exchanges between the two main female characters and a posse of other women in a bingo hall; the way that Meadows and his cinematographer Brian Tufano light the exterior of the hall – neon in twilight – so that it does fuse with the sensual music on the soundtrack.   Kathy Burke’s Carol – the daughter of parents who fostered Jimmy as a kid – is the most persuasive personality among the grown-ups.  With her thoroughgoing combination of humour and aggression, Carol really does belong in Meadows’ world, even if she is East End rather than East Midlands.  Carol lives apart from her C&W-mad Charlie husband (‘I am the Midlands Cowboy/I go from town to town … ‘).  The three other Glaswegians, in pursuit of Jimmy and the stolen money, break into Charlie’s home because Dek’s told them that’s where they’ll find Jimmy – but he’s out at the time.  The gang beat up Charlie and trash his C&W collection.  The staging of this violence is pretty crude but it leads into one of the film’s best sequences, when Carol gives Jimmy, once he’s come back to Charlie’s place, a piece of her mind.  Kathy Burke’s tirade is passionately, wittily sustained – a vintage Shane Meadows outburst.

    Carol then takes a baseball bat to Dek’s car and this is, alas, just about the last we see of Burke:  Meadows excludes Carol and Charlie from the climax.   In the closing stages, the film begins to gain coherence and momentum – the strength of the characters’ feelings measures up to the music and Rhys Ifans, once he begins to tone down his efforts to be funny, is more likeable.  Yet the happy ending – with Shirley committing to Dek and Jimmy heading back up to Scotland an unreformed character – is achieved too quickly and mechanically.   It makes sense emotionally largely because Shirley’s reverting to a life with Jimmy would have made no sense.   Still, Shirley Henderson is gentle and fragilely touching as Shirley; and Finn Atkins, the teenager who plays Marlene, is terrific – she also had a small part in This is England but I’m surprised Meadows hasn’t used her more often since this fine debut.   Marlene isn’t that demonstrative but Finn Atkins shows how much she’s feeling inside.  The girl is devoted to Dek – how much she loves him more than her biological father is one of the most striking things in Once Upon a Time in the Midlands.   The cast also includes Andrew Shim and James Cosmo.

    5 April 2012

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