Mark Jenkin (2019)
The trailer for writer-director Mark Jenkin’s Bait has been showing soundlessly on screens around the BFI building for several weeks now. The black-and-white images, especially the characters’ faces, are very striking. More recently, the trailer, with soundtrack, has played in BFI theatres before the main feature. The voices don’t do it any favours: when Sally saw and heard the trailer, she asked me if Bait was a spoof.
In a recent Sight & Sound (August 2019) interview, Philip Concannon notes that Bait ‘contains a mixture of experienced and non-professional actors’ and asks Jenkin what he looks for when casting:
‘Because of the way I shoot, with a lot of big close-ups, faces have got to be spot-on, so a lot of it is looking at people’s eyes and thinking, “Put a light there and you’re really going to jump off the screen.” I’m not really interested in realism in the performance necessarily, but I like there to be a lack of theatricality in it.’
Hard to decide from that (‘I’m not really interested … necessarily’) quite how uninterested Jenkin is in what his actors do, as distinct from how they look, but my different reactions to the trailer – without words vs with – might seem to endorse what he tells S&S. Only up to a point, though – the point at which cinema evolved from silent into talking pictures – and Jenkin doesn’t succeed in avoiding ‘theatricality’. The film’s protagonist is Martin Ward, an angry Cornish fisherman, dispossessed of his boat and livelihood. If you’re going to cast an inexperienced player as Martin and give him a line like, ‘It’s between me and the clamping company!’, better try and get him to sound natural rather than, as Edward Rowe does delivering the line, like a wooden actor. If you’re going to involve seasoned pros, it’s as well to steer clear of the likes of Simon Shepherd, who overplays Tim Leigh, the patronising epitome of rampant touristification of the Cornish coast, which so enrages Martin.
Yet the physical casting, as Jenkin intended, is spot-on. Edward Rowe, Giles King (as Martin’s brother Steven), Isaac Woodvine (as Steven’s son Neil) and Stacey Guthrie, facially and vocally the most nuanced performer (as Liz Stewart, the village pub landlady), are all strong-featured. Tim’s late-teenage son and daughter, Hugo (Jowan Jacobs) and Katie (Georgia Ellery), are no less effective for looking, respectively, foolishly wimpish and blandly entitled. In visual terms, Bait is altogether potent. Sequences describing the local fishermen at work, and often focusing on their working materials, are absorbing not least because the camera itself seems absorbed. (Jenkin also photographed the film, as well as editing it.) The sky-and-seascapes, judiciously rationed, have a dwarfing beauty. Words may not matter much to Jenkin but non-verbal sounds matter plenty – especially artificially amplified ones: the throbbing of boat motors, the heavy footfall of wellington boots.
That amplification, in conjunction with ominous (uncredited) music, supplies an atmosphere that foretells a grim climax to the confrontation between the locals and the Leigh family – to whom Martin and Steven, from financial necessity, sold their father Billy’s home, Skipper’s Cottage, after the old man died. Tim and his wife Sandra (Mary Woodvine) have bought up a row of what were once fishermen’s dwellings. The Leighs, presumably from in or around London, use Skipper’s Cottage as their holiday home and rent out their other properties. When Sandra welcomes a young couple (Morgan Val Baker and Mae Voogd) to their weekend retreat, there’s ‘a bottle of fizz and locally made cheese’ in the fridge and a cream tea awaits on the kitchen counter. Parking outside the cottages is a particular bone of contention between the Leighs and Martin (that’s where the clamping comes in). Jenkin also builds tension through bouts of insistent cross-cutting between what different characters are up to at the same time. While Neil and Katie (a Montague and Capulet item) prepare pasta, Tim and Sandra enjoy a supper of lobster – courtesy of Hugo, who stole it from one of Martin’s traps (Sandra has twinges of conscience about this; Tim welcomes his drippy son’s showing ‘a bit of initiative’). In the pub, Martin confronts Hugo and forces him to repair, there and then, the lobster pot he damaged. This triptych pulses with foreboding.
What’s in store is predicted too in a couple of early flashes-forward – to Tim, then Neil, laid out on the ground. The eventual altercations that bring this about occur at different points of the story. About halfway through the film (which runs 89 minutes), a fearlessly mouthy young barmaid Wenna (Chloe Endean) – her surname is Kowalski and she has a touch of the Stanleys – floors Tim, though he quickly recovers. When, much later, Hugo pompously censures Neil for sleeping with Katie and the two young men come to blows, the consequences are much more serious and, though semi-foreseen, startling. Neil falls from the quayside to some distance below; blood seeps from what’s clearly a fatal head wound. This sharply changed the mood in NFT2, where plenty of the audience had been chuckling contentedly at Bait‘s lampoon of the Leighs and at Martin’s choicer expletives. (Tim, in his favoured sportswear, is a ‘Lycra cunt’.)
The finale’s implications are disturbing. It’s not only Tim’s lot, ‘boosting’ the region’s tourist economy and helping make life for local fishermen even more financially unviable, with whom Martin is at daggers drawn. He’s also fallen out with his brother, for using their father’s fishing boat to take visitors on coastal trips, and with Liz, who nowadays closes the pub out of season. Martin, in other words, has become an outsider even within his own community but his aggressive intransigence is vindicated. The townie invaders – the males among them anyway – really are nasty pieces of work. That’s been evident all along (a dramatic mistake) in Tim’s lord-of-the-manor behaviour. Hugo’s acts of stealing Martin’s catch and causing the death of Neil (who worked alongside his father and uncle) are vivid symbols of the effects of gentrification. Realising his brother was right all along, it’s the grief-stricken Steven, not Martin, who trashes the pseudo-nautical décor whereby the Leighs have disfigured Skipper’s Cottage. The ghost of Billy (Martin Ellis), with whom Martin has occasionally conversed in the course of the story, now puts in a last appearance (a silent one) to see his sons tragically reconciled. In Bait‘s closing shots, as the brothers head back to shore in their father’s boat, Martin sees Neil waiting on the quayside – apparently uninjured, presumably the next ghost in waiting.
The apparitions are the most unequivocal indicator that Mark Jenkin is ‘not really interested in realism’. As such, they may also explain in part why reviews of Bait that I’ve read aren’t alarmed by the film’s message. Although I found most of the acting too primitive to believe what was going on, I did believe that Jenkin wanted to express serious concerns about what’s happening in his native Cornwall. He tells Philip Concannon that ‘if the fisherman [sic: a Freudian typo?] like it that’s all that matters’. The socio-economic crisis he presents is real, even if his method of dramatising it isn’t, for various reasons, realistic. Another factor in the critical response is Jenkin’s highly distinctive aesthetic, created by means, and with results, that Jonathan Romney describes in his Sight & Sound review as follows:
‘[Jenkin] filmed … on 16mm black-and-white Kodak stock with a 1976 wind-up Bolex camera, and used unconventional processing materials including coffee, washing soda and Vitamin C powder. … This approach yields consistently extraordinary effects: scratches, little tempests of spots on the on the image, flashes of solarisation …’
BFI showed, as a very brief curtain-raiser, an archive clip from the 1920s of Cornish fishermen at work in Newlyn – much easier on this photophobic eye than quite a lot of Bait, even though I assumed Jenkin was trying to suggest the look of antique black-and-white documentary. I repeatedly had to narrow my gaze or avert it completely from the recurrent flicker on the screen. It seems that, not unusually, visual achievement and allusion are insulating cineaste critics from what’s uncomfortable. They can admire a director’s technique and place the result in the safe context of cross-references to other films. I can’t. Bait is a very interesting piece of work but I found it disturbing to watch in more ways than one.
12 September 2019
