Daniel Wolfe (2014)
The trailers at Curzon Victoria before the screening of Catch Me Daddy included one for Gerard Johnson’s Hyena, which opened last year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival and which I’d hoped had sunk without trace. Daniel Wolfe’s debut feature, which he co-wrote with his brother Matthew, is a better and much less obnoxious piece of work than Hyena but there are similarities. Both films use as their basis well-known and topical social-criminal problems: drug trafficking combined with police corruption in Hyena; ‘honour’ killings in the British Asian community in Catch Me Daddy. In each case, the locations are well chosen and convincing. Gerard Johnson and Daniel Wolfe exploit these realistic elements of story and physical setting to give the impression of telling penetrating truths about life in contemporary Britain – and to lend credibility to plots contrived to include numerous sequences of bloody violence. Both directors end their film with uncharacteristic restraint – or evasiveness – at a point just before the climactic gruesomeness seems set to occur.
Whereas Hyena soon shows its meretricious hand, the early scenes of Catch Me Daddy are slow-moving. A young woman called Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) has run away from her Pakistani family and is living in a caravan on the moors outside a West Yorkshire town with her white boyfriend Aaron (Conor McCarron). In the caravan, they talk, drink and eat cake (Black Forest gateau – which Laila remembers fondly from childhood as a fixture on the menu at her father’s restaurant). They smoke (soft?) drugs, play and, in Laila’s case, dance to music. She has a job at a local hairdresser’s; Aaron is meant to be looking for work too but he spends the day in the caravan, getting stoned. (The film’s action takes place over the course of little more than twenty-four hours: I’m assuming the early stages describe the recently-established routine of the couple’s lives.) Aaron may be shiftless but he sees himself as in charge – to the extent of forbidding Laila from going clubbing with the hairdresser and her friends. Laila’s life with Aaron, although it has moments of pleasure, seems, while it’s on the screen, mostly dismal – you wonder if it was worth escaping to. By the end of Catch Me Daddy, their existence in the caravan feels like a lost paradise.
The early scenes of Laila and Aaron are intercut with introductions to the men – two whites and four South Asians, including Laila’s brother Zaheer (Ali Ahmad) – who are looking, on behalf of her father, to track Laila down. The two parts of the search party communicate but they also appear to compete with each other. The whites confirm where Laila is working but the South Asians aren’t prepared to wait for the hairdresser to re-open next day; under cover of darkness, they home in on the caravan while Laila is alone there – Aaron has popped out to buy some drinks and snacks. Zaheer insists on going into the caravan alone. In a struggle with Laila, he falls through a glass table and cuts his throat fatally. Meanwhile, one of the white men stands in wait for Aaron outside the convenience store where he’s shopping: Aaron realises this and manages to elude the man by chucking liquid in his face. Aaron and Laila then go on the run. This is just the start of a terrifying night.
I don’t know how often white thugs have actually been involved in carrying out Asian honour killings. When he reviewed the film in Cannes last year, Peter Bradshaw suggested ‘an unspoken agreement that the white guys are there to handle the white transgressor while the South Asian men will deal their errant daughter [sic]’ but the involvement of the white duo, Tony (Gary Lewis) and Barry (Barry Nunney), although crucial to the scheme of Catch Me Daddy, isn’t convincing. Its purpose is to allow a compare-and-contrast view of the ethnically different elements of the posse and to increase the permutations for violence. Barry, after beating and kicking Aaron to death, is killed in a skirmish with one of the surviving South Asians. This happens inside their car; the trio (Anwar Hussain, Adrian Hussain, Shoby Kasam) then drag Barry’s body outside the car and run over it, twice. (To be fair to Daniel Wolfe, you don’t see the corpse at this stage – only the car.)
The locale and the look of Catch Me Daddy, photographed by Robbie Ryan, are impressive in various ways. In an early sequence, Laila and Aaron walk across moorland, in daylight. They’re chatting and laughing in the big, bleak landscape. The image stays in your mind when, in pitch darkness, they’re stumbling across the moors, desperately trying to escape their pursuers. The landscape of motorways, fast food joints, minicab offices and convenience stores has a strongly anomic quality. (When Aaron gets a drink from a machine, it arrives in one of those crappy mushroom-coloured plastic cups. I remember them from the 1970s and was almost shocked they were still in circulation.) In comparison, Daniel Wolfe’s repeated shots of fish in tanks and lizards in glass containers stick out as superfluous arty touches. An early episode, in which Laila is given a two-for-one milk shakes offer by a kid in the street and goes to use it, has both a documentary and a dramatic charge, thanks to the seemingly stoned boy in the shop who prepares the milk shakes. Wolfe conveys strongly but, for the most part unemphatically, the near-ubiquity of drug-taking in the lives he’s describing – climaxing in a middle-of-the-night visit by Tony to his pusher, en route to returning Laila to her father. The music in the film, both the original score by Daniel Thomas Freeman and Matthew Wolfe (under the name Matthew Watson) and the selection of songs played on radios and so on, is interesting.
Sameena Jabeen Ahmed does well as Laila. Since the script requires her almost continuously to express extremes – druggy torpor, terror, traumatised silence, final horrified misery – it’s hard to tell what kind of actress she might be playing within a more normal range. Laila’s experiences are too much for one night – so much so that you get past the point of expecting Ahmed to express convincing reactions. I hadn’t seen Conor McCarron since Neds (and couldn’t place him while I was watching Catch Me Daddy). The plot twists involving Aaron, in combination with McCarron’s acting, make him the most surprising character in the film. The resource that he shows in trying to get himself and Laila away from their hunters is, after Aaron’s lethargy in the opening scenes, particularly unexpected – McCarron’s naturally alert quality makes it believable. It’s an effective twist too when the South Asians hold his mother (Kate Dickie) hostage – this is enough for Aaron to accept that Leila must be returned to her father. The most experienced, best-known actor in the cast is Gary Lewis, whose Tony is bounty-hunting mainly to keep himself supplied with cocaine. Lewis is quietly eloquent throughout: he suggests Tony’s conflicted feelings, a battle between urgent need and conscience, well before these are expressed in his actions.
Laila is eventually returned to her father Tariq (Wasim Zakir) at his balti house. Tariq veers between expressions of tearful, regretful affection for his daughter and violence towards her – especially once he discovers what has happened to his son. Tariq hangs a noose from the ceiling and forces Laila to stand on a chair and put her head through the noose. When the screen cuts to black, Laila is weeping. I assumed her situation was now so grim that she would kick the chair away to end her life and that the words ‘catch me daddy’, perhaps unspoken, would be in her mind as she did so. (I read that the film is named for a Janis Joplin song.) I understand why Catch Me Daddy has been well received but some of what’s been written is almost more alarming than the film itself. One thing which has impressed several critics is the echoes of John Ford’s The Searchers: Daniel Wolfe’s film begins as a ‘kitchen sink riff’ on Ford, according to Tara Brady in the Irish Times. This kind of reference, as well as displaying the reviewer’s movie knowledge, appears to enable them to put distance between themselves and the mayhem on screen that, to me, is an unignorable and oppressive feature of Catch Me Daddy. Peter Bradshaw, who also picks up on the Ford connection, praises the film as ‘a fierce and boldly questioning drama about tribal politics and gender politics in contemporary Britain’, and suggests that ‘some may find’ the ending of Catch Me Daddy ‘all too much’. Bradshaw can obviously take it, however. I’m not sure if I’m more envious of or worried by film critics who have the facility to reassure themselves – as Gerard Johnson, at the EIFF, advised the Hyena audience to reassure themselves – that what they’re watching is only a movie.
3 March 2015
