Old Yorker

  • Shell

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Scott Graham (2012)

    Writer-director Scott Graham’s first feature has virtually a single set and is essentially a two-hander.  The action takes place inside and immediately outside an isolated petrol station in the Scottish Highlands.  Shell is the name not of a product on sale at the pumps but of the teenage heroine (Chloe Pirrie), who lives here with her father Pete (Joseph Mawle).  Customers are few and far between; Pete also does car repairs or, when the vehicles are beyond repair, breaks them down for scrap metal.   Shell’s mother left when the girl was four and Pete is just about the only person in Shell’s life now that she’s left school.  The pair are unusually, if not unnaturally, close.  This central relationship, the routines of which are minutely observed, is more or less incestuous and it looks to be Shell, rather than Pete, who needs – or, at least, has fewer feelings of guilt about – physical intimacy.  Pete returns home after driving a consignment of scrap metal to its destination; his daughter sniffs his clothes and his breath for telltale signs; Pete admits he’s been in the pub but Shell seems jealously suspicious that he may also have the smell of another woman on him.  He goes to clean himself up:  Shell comes into the bathroom and holds her father as he tries to wash.  When the central heating breaks down in the freezing weather, she comes to share his bed.

    Pete is distressed by, and discourages, his daughter’s desire for bodily contact with him but he’s no less distressed when he thinks he’s lost Shell.  A young mother and her little girl arrive at the petrol station – the mother asks if the child can use the toilet.   The girl wanders through to stare at Pete, who’s sitting alone in the kitchen; you sense that he sees in her the image of the infant Shell.  When the mother and child drive away, Shell discovers the girl has left her rag doll behind and runs after the car to return it.   She goes some way down the road stretching away from the petrol station and Pete is distraught at her disappearance.  He appears to try to induce one of the epileptic (or similar) fits to which he’s prone, as if to get her back – and he succeeds.  When he’s lying in bed beside her, after the fit has passed, it’s Pete who kisses Shell passionately, and who needs to be reassured by her that she’s not going anywhere.   Scott Graham developed Shell from a twenty-minute short of the same name that he made in 2007 but the longer film (unlike Short Term 12, for example) doesn’t feel as if the material is being stretched beyond its natural limits.  Concentrating on the interactions of two people in a very particular situation, Graham succeeds in making these absorbing, disturbing and affecting, and his approach isn’t at all judgmental.

    Shell and her father both seem to try to interest themselves in other people.   It’s possible that Pete did have sex while he was away from home.  Shell, after inviting a young man called Adam (Iain de Caestecker), who works in a local sawmill, in to meet her father, goes on a drive with Adam.  He’s asked her out before.  He now takes the opportunity to have sex with Shell, whether she wants it or not (and she doesn’t), in the back of his car.  When Shell, Pete and Adam sit at the three sides of a window table in the house behind the petrol station, you notice that daughter and father drink from matching mugs, with a pattern of blue flowers, while their guest’s mug has a different design.  Shell is also a kind of agony aunt for Hugh (Michael Smiley), an older man who calls in for petrol every couple of weeks and tells Shell about his unhappy life as a divorced father of two, and about the weekends he gets to see his kids and which don’t work out.   After one of these weekends, he brings Shell a pair of tight-fitting jeans he’s bought for her.  She puts them on and flirts pretty blatantly with Hugh until he gets too close.  Other visitors include a fortyish couple, Claire (Kate Dickie) and Robert (Paul Thomas Hickey), whose car, on their way back to Edinburgh, collides with a deer and who come to the petrol station after dark, knocking for help.

    The mortally wounded deer, whose agony Pete ends by slitting its throat, becomes central to Shell.  I’m conscious, writing this, the animal will sound too obvious a symbol of tragic, sensitive innocence and, as might be expected with this kind of material, Scott Graham has been praised for making a ‘poetic’ movie.  Yet I think his use of the deer is poetic in the sense that he takes its image, and develops this variously – in ways which seem almost to take him, as well as the viewer, by surprise.  You suspect that the deer and Shell will be kindred spirits but the animal, although either young or female (or both), turns out to be at least as much Pete’s familiar.  Joseph Mawle’s ability to suggest very naturally in his face the look of a vulnerable animal is a big help in this.

    After the sequence in which Pete’s physical love for his daughter becomes evident, a deer wanders around near the petrol station then runs off into the countryside.  This turns out to be a dream of Pete’s.  Seeming to realise that he can’t live without Shell and she can’t have a life with him, Pete goes out onto the dark road and, standing in the path of a passing lorry, meets his end as the deer did (except that Pete puts himself out of his misery).  The beast also seems to represent the complex relationship – weighty, nourishing, unhealthy – between daughter and father.   In the sequences involving the deer that was killed, Pete, gasping for breath, lugs its carcass onto a trestle table and skins it as he might strip a car for its metal.  Shell gags when she and her father load their freezer with bags of venison and, after cooking some of it, can’t eat the meat (‘It’s like eating my own flesh’).  For the most part, Scott Graham interweaves these images so effectively that they transcend the underlying conception (although I could have done without a cut from the flaying of the carcass to a shot of Shell on the toilet wiping menstrual blood from her).   The wuthering, bleak landscape and deserted road to nowhere or somewhere beyond the petrol station may be clichés but Graham and his cinematographer Yoliswa Gärtig[1] create some resonant pictures from them – like the figure of Shell running with the doll down the road, or standing as if frozen in it.

    Newcomer Chloe Pirrie and Joseph Mawle succeed remarkably in creating a deep intimacy – not just in the obvious sense – between Shell and Pete.  I found the occasional visitors’ interests in Shell less easy to accept – why, in particular, the good-looking Adam wouldn’t just find other girls when Shell is reluctant to go out with him.  The book that Shell finds in Rob and Claire’s car – Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter – is too symbolically apt and Kate Dickie’s Claire gives Shell a parting look that’s too significant (even if I wasn’t sure what it meant).  The look of the little girl (Milla Gibson) gawping at Pete is much more expressive.  The ending of Shell, after Pete has gone, is mostly unconvincing.  Scott Graham, from this point onwards, seems to lose the balance of realism and symbolism which he’s managed skilfully in much of the movie.  Her father’s death allows Shell to share a bed with Adam (and he gets Pete’s old mug with his breakfast next morning) but Shell, although distraught when she discovers Pete’s death, looks to get over it quickly – and Adam doesn’t seem to expect her to be traumatised.  Finally, Shell – like Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces (and, more recently, the Paul Dano character in For Ellen) – gets a lift from a lorry driver and departs the petrol station, presumably for good.   This is a convenient way of getting her on the road to a new life but, since she’s bound to have that anyway, with Pete no longer there, I couldn’t see the need for an actual escape.

    17 November 2013

    [1] She is now Yoliswa von Dallwitz.

  • Iona

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Scott Graham (2015)

    A young woman and a teenage boy aboard a car ferry approach an island.  Once they’ve disembarked and driven a little way inland, they burn their car.   They then start walking further inland.  It’s clear that the woman is leading the way but she and the lad don’t exchange a word – or see another person – until they reach and enter a cottage.  A man of around fifty welcomes them in, although he’s clearly surprised to see them.  These are the first few minutes of the writer-director Scott Graham’s new film.  The island to which the couple has come is Iona, part of the Inner Hebrides on the west coast of Scotland.  The young woman’s name is Iona too.  She’s named for the place where she was born and to which she’s returning after a long absence.  The teenager accompanying Iona is her son Billy, who likes to be known as Bull, and their host at the cottage is Danny.  He’s widowed but he and his wife Helen were virtual foster parents to Iona, who grew up in their house along with her near-contemporary Elizabeth, Danny and Helen’s biological daughter.  Elizabeth is now married, to Matthew, an Englishman who farms on Iona, and they have a teenage daughter, Sarah.  She’s unable to walk – the result of a childhood accident.  It’s soon clear there’s bad blood between Iona and Elizabeth.  What lies behind this and the reason for Iona’s return to the island remain to be seen – although repeated flashbacks in Iona’s mind, to an act of violence involving Bull, are a hefty clue to solving the latter mystery.

    For a while, Iona is intriguing.  This is thanks to what’s on the screen – people who engage our interest, the austere beauty of the Hebridean landscape – and to the very slowness of the pace and to how little is being disclosed.  The story seems to be set in the present day:  this makes the permeation of religion in the life of Iona all the more striking.  We see the people at worship together in a small, unadorned chapel; Danny prays aloud as he makes breakfast for his new guests in the cottage.  In presenting other community activities – strawberry-picking, a ceilidh – Scott Graham strikes a good balance between documentary description of social ritual and arresting conversational exchanges between the main characters.   The dynamic movement at the ceilidh is an effective contrast to the tempo of the scenes that precede it; the cinematographer, Yoliswa von Dallwitz, injects vividly blue skies and green grass into shots of the rocky, grey terrain.  There comes a point, though, when absorption in Graham’s pregnant atmosphere turns to impatience.  We become so used to the elliptical narrative and so aware there’s an unexplained history that our interest is in finding out what happened before the story began, not in what happens next to the people in it.  And once Scott Graham starts to reveal the backstory, things go badly wrong.

    The central relationship in Graham’s previous film Shell, between a father and his teenage daughter, had definite elements of incest.  In Iona, Graham works similar implications into several pairings; some of these implications are more subtle than others but their cumulative effect is to create a governing incestuous pattern to relationships between parents and children.  When we first see Iona (Ruth Negga) and Bull (Ben Gallagher), we don’t know who they are to each other.  We can see her feelings of tenderness for him, though, and we don’t assume from their age difference that they can’t be a couple; we don’t assume either that they’re mother and son, especially since Ben is white and Iona is non-white.  On their arrival at the cottage, it’s hard to tell whether Iona greets Danny (Douglas Henshall) by name or as ‘Daddy’.  That uncertainty may be unintentional (it’s often hard to make out what Ruth Negga says) but it’s prophetically apt, since Danny both raised Iona and fathered her son.  (This was when Iona left the island.)  Bull doesn’t know Danny sired him:  the boy thinks that his biological father was the man who was Iona’s partner in their life on the mainland and whom Bull killed.  (The need to escape the consequences of the crime explains Iona’s return and the burning of the car.)  Because of her disability, Sarah (Sorcha Groundsell) is carried about on the back of Matthew (Tom Brooke) – this makes for an unusual physical proximity between a teenage girl and her father.  We become more conscious of its significance to Sarah when she and Bull leave the ceilidh together and Sarah seems to experience sensual pleasure in the novelty of being carried by a different man.

    Perhaps Scott Graham doesn’t mean to imply as much as I’m inferring but the prominence he’s given to sexual feelings between parents and their children in both the features he’s now made makes it difficult for anyone who saw Shell to avoid seeing incestuous possibilities – or, at least, Oedipus and Electra complexes in bloom – throughout Iona, even though the pieces of evidence aren’t individually conclusive.  In the flashbacks to the killing, Iona is on the floor beside the corpse of the father figure Bull has killed; her son stands over them.   Since the motive of the killing is never clarified, this positioning remains suggestive.  At Danny’s cottage, Iona and Bull share the bedroom that Iona and Elizabeth once shared.  The accident which caused irreparable nerve damage to Sarah’s legs occurred when she was riding in her father’s tractor and ‘I was telling him to go faster’.   And the sexual relationship between Iona and Danny definitely resumes.  When Elizabeth (Michelle Duncan) eventually tells Iona how hurt and betrayed she felt by that relationship – in its earlier phase, when the girls were teenagers – she sobs, ‘We were sisters!’   I took this to mean ‘we lived like sisters’ rather than that Danny is Iona’s biological father too – I hope I wasn’t wrong on that point, at least!

    The description of the life shared by the two main characters was the outstanding strength of Shell.  The story became increasingly less convincing when things happened outside the heroine’s relationship with her father – and you have to wonder from Iona whether Scott Graham, if he’s going to progress as a film-maker, may need to involve someone else in writing his screenplays in future.   Something clearly went wrong with the construction of Iona:  when it closed last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, it ran 110 minutes; the version now released (and which I saw on Curzon Home Cinema) is twenty-five minutes shorter.   Some of the plotting, especially around the character of Danny, is evasive.  It’s convenient that his wife has died some time ago (during Iona’s absence); there’s never any suggestion of what effect his sexual relationship with the teenage Iona had on the marriage.  Two thirds of the way through, Danny dies of an unexplained seizure.  The moment of his collapse is startlingly believable (even if it echoes too clearly the epileptic fits to which the father in Shell was prone).  Once you’ve recovered from the shock, you immediately miss Douglas Henshall (who’s particularly expressive showing Danny going about simple domestic routines in the kitchen).  You also realise that Danny has been disposed of because Scott Graham doesn’t know what else to do with the character.

    The social strand of Iona disintegrates in the closing stages.  It’s curious, in view of the community Graham presents early on, that Danny’s death registers so little outside the immediate family circle.  The religious theme isn’t abandoned but it’s used, in a disappointingly obvious and unconvincing way, to engineer dramatic conflict.   Iona lost her faith as a teenager:  it’s not made clear whether this was related to her becoming pregnant but she’s now implacably anti-religious.  Bull, on the other hand, although Iona has kept him away from religion throughout his urban upbringing, takes to the island’s Christianity like a duck to water – this is supposed to be because it offers Bull the possibility of forgiveness for his crime but it’s really so that he and his mother can have arguments.  Danny dies too suddenly for us to get any sense of whether he feels there’s a contradiction between his professed beliefs and his sexual behaviour – or whether we’re meant to assume that, because Danny‘s pious, he’s bound to be a hypocrite too.  There’s a further and an unfortunate metaphysical element.  Sarah’s combination of sexual feeling and lower-limbs paralysis doesn’t bode well from an early stage; by the time Bull has intercourse with her, you’re almost praying that it won’t result in a Brimstone and Treacle­-type miracle.  It seems for a few moments your prayers have been in vain but Scott Graham then seems to suggest Sarah has only imagined that she can move her legs.  This ambiguity feels like adding insult to injury, for the character and the audience.

    That said, Sorcha Groundsell as Sarah is one of the best things in Iona.  Her beatific prettiness has a childlike quality; at the same time, she’s very good at suggesting that Sarah both resents her condition and knows how to subdue the resentment.  The reliable Tom Brooke gives another strong performance as her father.  Matthew is well aware of the tensions between those closest to him but Brooke also gets across a sense that there’ve been happier experiences for Matthew and his family during Iona’s absence:  this suggestion of a settled life disrupted by Iona’s reappearance is a welcome counterpoint to the increasingly tortured and melodramatic events of the story.  The shadings Tom Brooke brings to his role are what’s lacking in Ruth Negga’s portrait of Iona.  Negga is a sadly lovely and magnetic image in the early scenes but, as the film goes on, she switches from quick-tempered defensiveness to tortured yelling and back, with not much characterisation in between.  Later this year, Ruth Negga will be seen in Jeff Nichols’s Loving, the story of a real-life interracial marriage in 1950s America.  Her character’s ethnicity will be a crucial part of Loving; in Scott Graham’s film, it’s never spoken of – even though Iona is the only person of colour in a community which, in various ways, seems to be living in the past.  We don’t even get the sense it’s something that everyone on the island notices but that no one mentions.

    25 March 2016

Posts navigation