Film review

  • Bait

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

     

  • Mrs Lowry & Son

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Adrian Noble (2019)

    Not long into it, I thought:  this might have worked better as a radio play.  When I looked it up online afterwards, I discovered that’s what Mrs Lowry & Son originally was, in 2012[1].  It was soon clear too that Adrian Noble’s film was stretching slender material beyond its natural length.  Broadcast on Radio 4, Martyn Hesford’s two-hander ran forty-five minutes – almost exactly half the length of this adaptation of it (with a screenplay by the author).  As a play for voices, Hesford’s account of the relationship between L S Lowry and his bedridden but domineering mother – a portrait of the artist as a henpecked, middle-aged bachelor – might allow the audience to exercise some imagination.  Perhaps not much since the images of places and people that Lowry painted are so well and widely known.  But putting the play on a screen kills it, especially with two strong actors in the title roles.  The faces and physical attitudes of Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall say plenty – enough to mean their dialogue is sometimes surplus to requirements.  Adrian Noble compounds the tautology through the use of uninspired little flashbacks:  Elizabeth Lowry’s younger self (Rose Noble) seated at the piano that she dreamed of playing professionally, she and the child Lawrie (Laurence Mills) together on an otherwise deserted seashore.  There’s even the occasional insertion of a Lowry painting – an extra superfluous visual aid.

    The widowed Elizabeth is in constant, querulous mourning for the lost, ‘respectable’ way of life she enjoyed in the Victoria Park suburb of Manchester – a life she’s had to exchange for the grimy, narrow streets of Pendlebury, in nearby Salford.  ‘Enjoyed’ may not be the right word:  in one of the script’s rare amusing lines, she’s precise in telling Lawrie she hasn’t been happy since 1868, ‘the year I was confirmed’.  It’s now 1934.  Disappointed by her husband (Michael Keogh, glimpsed in another of the flashbacks), who died in debt, and now by her son, Elizabeth continually deprecates Lawrie’s art.  She’s infuriated that he wants to portray working-class people and their surroundings in preference to ‘cultured’ things – ‘a nice bowl of fruit’, for example.  She persistently discourages his hopes of a painting career, partly out of fear that might take Lawrie away from her. He has a job as a rent collector, returning each afternoon to make tea then cook supper for them both, before settling Elizabeth down for the night.  Outside the house and his work, Lawrie appears to be socially quite isolated, except for the local kids he plays grandmother’s footsteps with, as he heads up the street towards home.

    If Mrs Lowry & Son were sound only, there might be a bit of suspense around whether, when she gets acquainted with a new neighbour who ‘shops at Marshall and Snelgrove’ and is as hungry as herself for better things, Elizabeth is fantasising.  On screen, it’s clear that Doreen Stanhope (Wendy Morgan) is real – so too her husband (Stephen Lord), who lets the side down, being a Socialist for a start, then paying money for one of Lawrie’s unlovely pictures – to Doreen, a distressing reminder of her wrong-side-of-the-tracks past.  What mysteries the film does have, seem to be unintentional.  How is it, when Lawrie gets in each night, that his mother’s voice comes through loud and clear in the downstairs hall, even though, when he then goes up to her room, the door is closed?  On the evidence of their conversations inside the bedroom, her voice is far from strong – or is she feigning frailty?  Knowing little of Lowry’s biography, I never got clear to what extent Elizabeth was pretending to be an invalid.  Her ill health seems to be psychological – she’s neurotic and depressed – rather than physical.  There’s the odd (standard-issue) malade imaginaire joke (she wails she has no appetite, her son asks, ‘One sausage or two?’ and she answers, ‘Three – and a round of bread and butter to help my digestion’).  But there’s next to no suggestion that his mother is able-bodied when Lawrie’s back is turned – unless we’re meant to think that’s how she managed to get talking with Mrs Stanhope.

    Another difficulty with the evidence before our eyes is that Timothy Spall is an excessively mature Lowry – even allowing that people-looked-older-in-those-days.  Adrian Noble draws attention to this by dating things specifically, including a short flashback to the child Lawrie, labelled ‘1894’.  He should only be in his mid-to-late forties in 1934 (Lowry was actually forty-seven then) but Spall looks the sixty-two that he actually is.   Maybe we’re supposed just to accept that his mother puts years on Lawrie but you can’t help wondering if Spall struck the film-makers as the go-to actor because he’d recently been Mr Turner.   He hasn’t much to do here; perhaps as a result, he sometimes does too much.   Each time he comes home and his mother calls, ‘Is that you, Lawrie?’, Spall reacts as if it’s a new frustration rather than a demoralising routine.  Vanessa Redgrave, at eighty-two, is about the right age for her role, which she plays more inventively than the script or direction deserves.  Her height and presence make Elizabeth probably too extraordinary a figure:  her authority in the household is proclaimed in her physicality, before she even opens her mouth.  In drama as dull as this one, however, you’re grateful that Redgrave’s maternal tyranny is so striking.

    Elsewhere, the infrequent attempts to inject eye-catching life into what’s essentially a dialogue have the quality of aberrations.   On his rent collection round, Lowry arrives at a house outside which a man (David Schaal) sits in his tin bath.  When he rises from it, shouting for a towel, it adds to the embarrassment of his wife (Joanne Pearce), who can’t pay the rent either.  Whether or not Lowry ever painted male nudes, I don’t know (this figure certainly isn’t a matchstick man), but the sequence is incongruous.  The snapshots of Doreen Stanhope’s miserable home life are crudely melodramatic:  Wendy Morgan, an excellent, long underused screen actress (she was brilliant in The Jewel in the Crown back in 1984), is wasted.  When his mother’s behaviour finally causes him to snap, Lawrie prepares a bonfire of his paintings.  Perhaps this really did happen but this too seems overdone, as well as familiar:  it’s what at-the-end-of-their-tether artists usually do on screen.  The cinematographer Josep M Civit’s palette is muted, to put it mildly.  When, late on, Lawrie stands in front of a red door, the effect is almost disorienting.  It’s such an obvious device to render his limited existence as drained of colour – and it isn’t a wholly accurate reflection of Lowry’s own palette, as a montage of his paintings at the end of the film makes clear.

    Adrian Noble is a big name in theatre – he was artistic director of the RSC for thirteen years – but this is only his third cinema feature, and the first two were adaptations of stage productions he’d recently done (A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2015)[2]).  No doubt they prefer working in the theatre but there’s another good reason why the likes of Noble and Trevor Nunn, another longstanding RSC chief, rarely make movies.  They don’t seem to know how – as Nunn showed recently with Red Joan (2018) and Noble demonstrates with Mrs Lowry & Son.  It might seem an odd coincidence that both films overuse the music written for them.  Because Noble’s material is dramatically thin compared with Nunn’s, Craig Armstrong’s fancy score for Mrs Lowry & Son is much more intrusive than George Fenton’s was in Red Joan – but the excess of music seems in each case to suggest that the director thinks it’s an inevitable part of what ensures that a film is involving.  This secondhand approach to creating cinema is reflected too in an assumption that, because film-is-a-visual-medium, you can’t have too many images – even if, as in Mrs Lowry & Son, you’ve also got lots of words saying the same thing.  The result is a kind of impaction.  Noble puts a lot of pictures on the screen but they don’t add up to a motion picture.

    10 September 2019

    [1]  I think originally:  it was also a theatre play in 2013 – I’m assuming that was its first stage production.

    [2] In the case of The Importance of Being Earnest, the film clearly was the stage production:   the poster announces ‘Filmed Live at the Vaudeville Theatre, London’.

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