Film review

  • Northern Soul

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elaine Constantine (2014)

    I can’t say I enjoyed it much but Northern Soul is no mean achievement.  It was made four decades on from the year in which Elaine Constantine sets her story but I never doubted I was watching events in 1974, thanks to the clothes, the hairstyles, the décor – and the visual texture contrived by Constantine and her cinematographer, Simon Tindall, which gives proceedings the look of seventies TV news footage.  The action is based in the writer-director’s native Lancashire, epicentre of the music and dance movement that gives the film its title, enriches and unsettles the life of its late-teenage protagonist, John (Elliot James Langridge), and sparks his friendship with another local, Matt (Josh Whitehouse).  The Black American soul music to which Matt introduces John fuels the narrative and provides the boys with a means of escape – in reality and in their dreams – from dead-end jobs in Burnsworth, their ‘shit-hole’ home town (and only technically fictional).  John and Matt want more than the quasi-religious experience of moving ecstatically on the dance floor to the 45s they love.  They intend to become top DJs on the Northern Soul circuit.  Their hearts are set on travelling to America, the soul music mother lode.

    The film’s breakneck pace chimes with John and Matt’s thrilling, increasingly out-of-control involvement in a working-class cultural phenomenon that Constantine chiefly celebrates but also critiques.  Speed is of the essence:  amphetamines are swallowed by the handful, sometimes with nightmare consequences that de-romanticise what could otherwise have been a simple piece of nostalgia.  The young actors in the main roles also contribute to Northern Soul‘s slice-of-life quality because they’re unknown quantities.  (Elliot James Langridge and Josh Whitehouse, according to IMDb, have both had regular screen work in the years since they made this film but mostly in smaller parts.)  It’s different in the early scenes with Christian McKay and Lisa Stansfield playing John’s parents, Ricky Tomlinson his grandfather and Steve Coogan a strenuously sarky schoolteacher.  But grandpa dies, John walks out of an exam and school for good, and leaves home.  John Thomson is DJ at the youth club where John first meets Matt but they soon abandon this place, too.  From that point on, the film is happening in a world of largely unfamiliar faces whose acting is good enough to reinforce the semblance of reality.  (James Lance does well in the small but important role of Ray Henderson, the star DJ on the circuit.)  The one exception, for this viewer, was Antonia Thomas, whom I’d seen in Dexter Fletcher’s Sunshine on Leith (2013); here she’s Angela, a nurse for whom John regularly gives up his seat on the bus when he’s still going to school and who turns out to be another Northern Soul enthusiast.  As in Sunshine on Leith, Thomas is vivid and likeable but performs less naturally than some others in the cast.

    The younger actors’ words are often hard to decipher and the visuals are sometimes impenetrably murky but it’s clear enough that Constantine’s screenplay – as a series of events and a collection of character types – is essentially formulaic.  John’s mother and father, for example, are stock dreary parents with no feeling for their son’s frustrations and ambitions:  their only noteworthy feature is that, given their age, they must be contemporaries of the misunderstood teenagers of British pop films of the late 1950s/early 1960s.  The story is rather more interesting as a dual romance.  Despite John’s diffidence, he and Angela end up an item but it’s his friendship with Matt that’s the heart of Northern Soul.  In accordance with romantic-movie convention, these best mates have a big falling out that requires a last-minute reconciliation.  By this stage, Matt has come down to earth with a bump, working as a labourer for the local council.  One night, John confronts him on a job, hoping to make peace.  Matt tells him where to get off but John wins him round by graffitiing the lyrics of Tobi Legend’s Northern Soul classic ‘Time Will Pass You By’ on walls and bridges around Burnsworth.  Next morning, Matt wakes in the passenger seat of a council van to see John’s handiwork:  it takes a few moments for him to realise he isn’t still asleep and dreaming.  Tobi Legend’s voice on the soundtrack reinforces the song’s carpe diem urgency.  Matt jumps out of the van and finds John at work on his next graffito.  All is instantly forgiven.  John invites Matt to hear his latest record and they walk off into the sunrise together.

    Born in Bury in 1965, Elaine Constantine, according to a 2015 Guardian interview with Charles Gant (used as the BFI handout for this screening), had been ‘a fan of heavy-beat, fast-tempo American soul since her teen years’.  She was well established and internationally recognised as a photographer when she made Northern Soul, which was clearly was a labour of love.  Charles Gant notes that Constantine had already created mini-documentaries on the subject but she was evidently determined to work her fascination with this music and culture into a piece of drama – she wrote the script after completing the Writers Boot Camp online screenwriting programme.  Nearly a decade on, Northern Soul, an unexpected hit with critics and audiences alike, remains Constantine’s sole cinema feature.  It seems to be the one and only story that she wanted to tell on screen.

    30 March 2023

  • The Beasts

    Old YorkerFilm review

    As bestas

    Rodrigo Sorogoyen (2022)

    In the remote Galician village they’ve made their home, Antoine (Denis Ménochet) and Olga (Marina Foïs) are newcomers and, as far as some of their neighbours are concerned, unwelcome intruders.  This middle-aged, middle-class French couple moved to northwest Spain a few years ago to live and work closer to nature, growing and selling their own organic produce, as well as investing in the renovation of abandoned properties in the locality.  Despite their green credentials, it’s their opposition to a renewable energy initiative that has sharpened the hostility of the Anta family – the brothers Xan (Luis Zahera) and Lorenzo (Diego Anido), and their widowed mother (Luisa Mereles).  A Norwegian company wants to buy and develop the area as a wind farm; the Antas, who’ve lived for generations in the village, are keen to sell and get funds enough to move elsewhere.  Antoine and Olga are in a tiny minority in refusing to sign up to the project but their opposition has been enough to prevent its going ahead.

    In response, the Anta brothers make a threatening nuisance of themselves – giving Antoine and Olga the evil eye at every opportunity, trespassing on their property, putting lead in the farm’s well to ruin the tomato harvest.  Antoine reports their behaviour to the Guardia Civil, who merely advise him to talk the problems through with Xan, the elder brother.  Antoine, knowing that won’t work, starts secretly recording what the brothers say and do – which only increases Xan’s fury when he finds out.  Out in their car one night, Antoine and Olga find the road blocked by the Antas’ vehicle.  Xan and Lorenzo get out, brandishing a shotgun; they approach the car and bang on the driver’s window until Antoine winds it down.  He and Olga get home in one piece but she’s now fearful for their safety.  She thinks the Antas would have killed her husband if she’d not been there.

    Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s drama – a commercial and critical hit in Spain, where it recently won no less than nine Goya awards – is always grim but otherwise a film of two halves.  I spent most of the first half thinking:  why is it taking so long?  There were no subplots.  It was obvious where things were heading.  I was wrong about that, though, and the second half of The Beasts proved absorbing – partly because it was unexpected, partly because it was mystifying.  I’d been waiting for the story to develop into an Iberian version of Straw Dogs (1971) – to see Antoine, a teacher before he and his wife changed their lifestyle and country, forced by the barbarism of others into showing his own dark, brutal side in order to survive.  Unlike Dustin Hoffman’s professor in the Sam Peckinpah film, Denis Ménochet’s Antoine looks as if he can take care of himself.  Also unlike the Hoffman character, it turns out he can’t.  The startling removal from The Beasts of its main character and best-known actor (outside Spain anyway) suddenly gives it an unforeseen kinship with Psycho (1960) rather than Straw Dogs.

    On the subject of dogs, there’s a minor, more pleasant surprise.  Antoine’s constant companion, along with his wife, is Titan, their German Shepherd.  In films whose protagonist is on the receiving end of a gradually encroaching campaign of menace, it’s standard practice for the tormentors to break down resistance by killing a much-loved animal belonging to their human prey.  When Antoine and Titan are walking through woodland, and the Anta brothers whistle the dog away from his owner and towards them, you don’t expect to see Titan again other than as a corpse.  The only kind of happy ending in this film is that Titan, in the last scenes of The Beasts, is still going strong.  An opening sequence involving a different species anticipates Antoine’s fate.  Text on screen about cutting wild horses’ manes and electronically tagging the animals introduces visual confirmation of the procedure:  two men are needed to put one horse into a headlock and do the necessary.  When Antoine is accosted in the wood by Xan and Lorenzo, a two-against-one struggle follows and Antoine is smothered to death.

    If the shock of the murder is disorienting, its aftermath is bewildering.  The crime takes place in broad daylight.  Sorogoyen then cuts to Olga, in bed alone, presumably that night.  She registers that Antoine hasn’t returned but without evident alarm.  When she discovers Titan is where he should be, without his master, she appears to assume the worst and to be silently resigned to it.  She embarks on a painstaking, apparently solo search for her husband’s body in the woods, which stretch over a huge area.  She marks off on a map each section that she completes.  There’s a scene where Olga discusses a particular part of the woodland with the Guardia Civil, whose officers seem hardly more engaged than when Antoine first reported the Antas to them, except that the officers tell Olga, ‘that area was combed last year’.  The passage of time since Antoine’s disappearance is as hard to get a handle on as Olga’s grave acceptance of his fate.  She becomes emotional only in an extended verbal set-to with her daughter, Marie (Marie Colomb), who travels from her home in France, where she has a young child, to stay with her mother for some time.  Olga raises her voice in this exchange only in response to Marie’s furious exasperation with her insistence on staying in Galicia in spite of what’s happened and Marie’s fears of what might yet happen.

    The mother-daughter showdown is one of only three scenes in The Beasts where words come thick and fast:  another is a dialogue between Antoine and Xan in the village pub, when ‘Frenchy’, as Xan calls him, insists on buying his adversary a drink and discussing the bones of contention between them.  Antoine says that if a further vote on the developers’ deal results in his being its only opponent, he and Olga will leave the village – but not until they’ve recouped their losses resulting from the destruction of the latest harvest.  Xan derides Antoine’s offer (any further delay, he says, will mean the energy company finds a different site for development) before giving voice to the Antas’ various resentments.  He rails against his family’s lot and at the privileged, entitled position of Antoine and Olga.  He complains that his younger brother, left brain-damaged by an accident some years ago, was once a handsome lad but that, even before the accident, girls never liked Lorenzo, or Xan himself, because ‘we stank’.  This viewer wasn’t sure why personal hygiene was more of a challenge for the Anta brothers than for other villagers leading a hardscrabble existence though you can’t blame Antoine for opting not to raise the question.  But the argument in the pub, especially in retrospect, raises a larger issue about The Beasts.

    From the start, the animus towards the newcomers is economically focused – more definitely than in Straw Dogs or John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), which The Beasts also occasionally brings to mind:  this receives its fullest expression in Xan’s litany of complaints.  It’s not surprising that plenty of reviewers assume that Sorogoyen and his co-writer Isabel Peña are commenting on the continuing rise in western democracies of bitter xenophobia among the financially dispossessed.  (The screenplay is inspired by a real-life homicide, in the Galician village of Santoalla, that took place in 2010 and was the subject of a feature-length documentary, Santoalla, by Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer, released in 2016.)  This doesn’t fit, though, with other aspects of the drama.   It seems most of the community are in the same financial boat as the Antas and share their enthusiasm for selling the land but the other villagers aren’t comparably hostile towards Antoine and Olga, which makes it harder to see Xan, Lorenzo and their mother as representative.  The only other character with plenty to say about the wind farm proposals is Rafael (Machi Salgado).  His father, who has recently died and left his property to Rafael, was one of the few others standing out against the development proposals.  His son holds a different view and tries to persuade Antoine and Olga to change their mind.  The film’s third talky scene consists of a virtual monologue from Rafael, whose motives for selling aren’t the same as the locals’.  He owns a dry-cleaning chain:  he wants a quick financial return on his inheritance because he already has a successful business to run.

    Once Antoine is gone, there’s no further mention of the wind farm (it seems Xan was right when he insisted the developers would simply look elsewhere) and Olga takes over as the main character.  She runs the farm alone, with some help from Pepiño (José Manuel Fernández y Blanco), an untypically pleasant local.  Some reviews of The Beasts suggest that this too has a larger meaning – that the noisy male antagonism that dominates the film’s first half gives way to quiet female stoicism and getting on with things in the second.  A short conversation between Olga and Madre Anta near the end of the film might seem to bear this out:  her husband’s body is yet to be found but Olga calmly tells the Anta matriarch that only the two of them will be left once the old woman’s sons have gone to prison for Antoine’s murder.  But if this remark has symbolic import it doesn’t make much realistic sense:  the other local women (rarely seen) aren’t being left by their menfolk to fend for themselves.  And Marie, a more prominent character than Madre Anta in the second half of The Beasts, is far from quietly stoical – even if she does eventually return to France accepting that her mother will stay put.

    Although the film is labelled a thriller on both Wikipedia and IMDb, it’s remarkable for not making use of smoking guns.  Anticipating the Antas’ attack in the woods, Antoine sets his camera to record what happens there; Olga, on her tireless search for her husband, in due course discovers the camera but it turns out the memory card is irreparably corrupted.  The film ends with Olga, after being informed by Pepiño that a body has been discovered, on her way to identify it.  On the way, the car she’s in passes Madre Anta, walking alone, and Olga’s face betrays a faint gleam of vindication.  Marina Foïs plays her with impressive consistency and concentration but Rodrigo Sorogoyen has set his lead actress a difficult task:  Olga remains hard to fathom.  Her opacity chimes with DP Alex de Pablo’s ingenious lighting of The Beasts.  The look of the Galician landscape, even under blue skies, is stubbornly sombre.

    29 March 2023

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