Film review

  • The Outrun

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nora Fingscheidt (2024)

    The Outrun is based on a 2016 book of the same name by the Scottish author and journalist Amy Liptrot.  The book isn’t a work of fiction:  it has been described as a travelogue and a ‘recovery memoir’; it won the Wainwright Prize, awarded to the year’s ‘best work of general outdoors, nature and UK-based travel writing’; and the PEN/Ackerley Prize, awarded annually to ‘an autobiography of literary excellence … by an author of British nationality’.  Amy Liptrot, who grew up on a farm in Orkney, lived and worked in London after graduating from the University of Edinburgh.  During her ten years in England, she became an alcoholic and a drug user.  She returned to Orkney to rehabilitate.  Her book may have been more than a description of the recovery process.  The timeframe involved – Liptrot stopped drinking in 2011 – implies that the very process of writing The Outrun was integral to the recovery.  If that’s so, Nora Fingscheidt’s dramatisation of the material is bound to be essentially different from its source.  Liptrot shares the screenplay credit (with Fingscheidt).  Her screen alter ego Rona, played by Saoirse Ronan, occasionally draws and jots down notes.  Yet the film, good as it is, seems to be happening at one remove from its inspiration – and becomes more conventional as a result.

    It takes time to adjust to Fingscheidt’s fragmented narrative, as The Outrun moves back and forth between Orkney landscapes and London clubs and bedrooms, with flashbacks to the protagonist’s childhood and imaginings of the natural world, and, at one point, an animated sequence.  The splintered structure may well be intentional – a way of suggesting the unmoored existence Rona is leading – but it makes her story frustrating as well as unsettling to watch for the first half hour or so.  At the start, Rona’s voiceover explains the myth of the selkie: a seal that comes surreptitiously ashore and removes her seal-skin to reveal a beautiful human form – if seen by any human eye she can no longer return to her true home of the sea.  This is the first of many voiceover references to Orcadian fauna, flora and folklore.  Attempts to emulate the strongly visual words on the soundtrack with what appears on the screen don’t always work.  Rona’s remark that she often thinks of areas of Orkney mapped onto areas of equivalent size in London introduces a montage of juxtaposed images – an empty field vs a crowded street, and so on – and the effect is a bit banal.  But plenty of Fingscheidt’s image-making is imaginative, DP Yunus Roy Imer’s lighting is ingenious, and Saoirse Ronan’s portrait of Rona gives The Outrun an increasingly compelling focus.

    Ronan spoils us:  she’s always good.  Still only thirty, she has already run up an amazing sequence of brilliant performances – from Atonement (2007), through Brooklyn (2015) and Lady Bird (2017), to Little Women (2019) – in all of which she harnessed dramatic power and humour.  (Her flair for comedy shone through even in a weak film like See How They Run (2022).)  Rona in The Outrun is a worthy addition to Ronan’s gallery of memorable characters.  Everything she does – whether Rona is paralytic or drinking in the natural beauty of Orkney – feels true.  Even when Rona is despondent, as she often is, Ronan is still vivid.  She gets fine support from Stephen Dillane, who plays her bipolar father, and Saskia Reeves, as Rona’s evangelical-Christian mother.  (The parents still both live on the family farm but separately, he alone in a caravan some distance from the farmhouse.)   Dillane was a particular letdown in the largely disappointing second series of Sherwood on television recently so it’s good to see him back on form here.  In her unobtrusive way, Reeves is as reliably excellent as Ronan.  In the London scenes, the younger actors, including Paapa Essiedu as Rona’s boyfriend, don’t have the same opportunities to register but Nabil Elouahabi, though he has only a single scene, comes through.

    After sessions in a my-name-is-and-I’m-an-alcoholic group in London, Rona continues rehab at her parents’ home and then, when her father’s depressed state causes her to fall off the wagon, living alone on the small Orkney island of Papa Westray.  The actor playing the middle-aged man who runs the village store there is (as far as I can tell) uncredited on IMDb – a pity because he’s first-rate in what is a small but crucial role.  When he clocks Rona as a recovering alcoholic, he asks how long she has been sober.  (Text on the screen every now and then supplies her current total of consecutive days without a drink.)  When she returns the question, the man’s answer is 12 years, 4 months, 29 days.  He says taking it one day at a time is the only way.  ‘But does it get easier?’ asks Rona.  ‘Yes’, he replies, ‘but never easy – just less hard’.  The Outrun is not only well acted but well written, too.  The title, by the way, is intriguing.  According to Wiktionary, ‘outrun’, as a noun, can mean (in Scotland) a ‘piece of outlying grazing land on an arable farm’; it’s also a term in ski jumping – the area ‘past the landing point, where the skier can slow down’.  Perhaps Amy Liptrot had both, or something else, in mind.

    For the reasons suggested at the start of this note, Nora Fingscheidt’s film feels constrained most of the time.  It struggles to break free of being a type of screen story – the story of someone whose big-city life is a disastrous mess returning to, and being restored by, their native heath and culture.  The Outrun isn’t merely formulaic, though.  We can see that her much-loved father’s condition has always been a saddening anxiety to Rona.  She says at one stage that she ‘can’t be happy sober’ and it’s one of the film’s strengths that it resists the temptation to oversimplify her recovery.  At the end you don’t think ‘Oh, that’s nice, she’s sober and her life’s happy now’.  You do see that she feels better about herself and has a renewed sense of purpose.  She decides to resume her research degree studies in London (focusing on seaweed biology, in which she has become passionately interested).  You also see that Rona, drink-free, can experience moments of happiness.  Nora Fingscheidt illustrates these in two very different examples that combine to deliver a successful ending – in which the film comes closest to independent creative life.

    As that selkie prologue immediately implied, Rona is herself something of a marine creature.  She swims in the sea more than once.  In the film’s climax, she stands on the shore enthralled, conducting a kind of ecstatic sea symphony.  The contrast to this enjoyably OTT bit comes in the film’s last scene.  While on Orkney, she has been doing part-time work for the RSPB.  This chiefly involves listening out for the distinctive call of the corncrake, an endangered species on the islands, and recording when and where exactly she hears the bird.  When her father asks how the job’s going, Rona admits she hasn’t heard a single corncrake – ‘so not great’.  It stays that way until she’s walking down the road at the end, about to leave Papa Westray.  A sound stops her in her tracks.  She listens, hears the sound again then, as a bonus, sees the bird briefly at the side of the road.  She laughs and so did I.

    3 October 2024

  • The Mind Benders

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Basil Dearden (1963)

    Dirk Bogarde is astonishing in this flawed but, thanks to him, dramatically powerful film.  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Basil Dearden and his producing partner Michael Relph had developed a reputation for earnest social-issue dramas – Violent Playground (1958), Sapphire (1959), Victim (1961).  The pair’s best film during those years, The League of Gentlemen (1960), is a comedy thriller but a socially aware one, and The Mind Benders is inspired by topical controversy.  A legend on the screen after the opening titles announces that ‘This story was suggested by experiments on “THE REDUCTION OF SENSATION [sic]” recently carried out at certain Universities in the United States’.

    Professor Sharpey (Harold Goldblatt) takes a train from London Paddington to Oxford, where he heads a lab.  We’ve already seen that his briefcase contains wads of banknotes and that Sharpey’s worried by this.  During the train journey he suddenly gets up from his seat, opens the carriage door and jumps out.  Standing on the track beside the stopped train and the professor’s dead body, the eyes of his horrified colleague, Dr Tate (Michael Bryant), meet those of another man, Major Hall (John Clemens) from MI5.  Sharpey, a public supporter of CND, has recently been seen in the company of shady Eastern European-looking types.  Hall, who believes he killed himself from shame at betraying his country, comes to Oxford to investigate his scientific work.  He learns that, after studying the behavioural and psychological effects of exposure to extreme cold on a polar explorer (Roger Delgado), Sharpey’s team switched their focus to sensory deprivation of another kind.  The Oxford lab houses an isolation tank in which Sharpey and his right-hand man, Dr Henry Longman (Bogarde), have been making themselves the subjects of their own experiments.  According to Tate, the final mental stage resulting from such isolation is a kind of ‘zombie’ state.  Hall, who knows a thing or two about the subject, reckons there’s more to it than that:  prolonged immersion in the tank may have left Sharpey ripe for Soviet brainwashing.

    Hall first meets Longman at the latter’s home, which he shares with his wife Oonagh (Mary Ure) and their four young children.  Longman has been off work, traumatised by his own experiences of sensory deprivation.  Outraged when Hall accuses Sharpey of treason, he resolves to return to the lab and the isolation tank, it seems in order to refute the brainwashing theory.  The session goes ahead with Tate and lab assistant Norman (Terry Palmer), as well as Hall, in attendance.  While Longman is deep underwater, Hall asks the other two about their colleague’s strongest commitments:  Tate and Norman agree that love for his wife is one of Longman’s outstanding qualities.  After he emerges from the tank, the attempted brainwashing gets underway.  Tate, abetted by Hall, repeatedly disparages Oonagh – she’s a useless, faithless wife, can’t provide the care the couple’s children need, and so on.  When Oonagh arrives at the lab to take her husband home, it appears the brainwashing has been singularly ineffective.  Months later, when Tate visits the Longmans, things have changed dramatically.  Longman now addresses his wife, heavily pregnant with their fifth child, with a contempt that verges on outright hostility.

    The screenplay by James Kennaway (best known as the writer of Tunes of Glory (1960)) is intriguing but shaky, with a sometimes puzzling timeframe.  In particular, when Tate visits the Longmans and finds their relationship transformed, it appears he hasn’t seen either of them in some time.  The long vacation could be part of the reason but it turns out there’s a Bonfire Night party the very evening of Tate’s visit:  so has Longman been back on sick leave ever since his latest immersion?  Well as he plays Tate in the early stages, Michael Bryant is especially ill-served by the script’s defects.  Tate is surprisingly untroubled when he takes the brainwashing lead.  If the explanation for this – and for Tate’s lack of remorse for what then happens – is meant to be that, as is eventually revealed, he carries a torch for Oonagh, it’s unconvincing.  Tate admits that it’s only recently he has realised his true feelings for her, and Oonagh remains, despite everything, devoted to her husband.

    At the Guy Fawkes gathering, Longman drunkenly flirts with a young woman called Annabelle (Wendy Craig) and heads off to the lab with her, where they’re confronted by Tate and Hall (conveniently back in Oxford for the occasion).  The action then switches to Annabelle’s houseboat.  On grassland beside the canal, Longman cruelly humiliates Oonagh, who falls over as she tries to follow him.  Her drags her up and she goes into premature labour.  Inside the telephone-less houseboat, he instructs Annabel to hurry to the nearest call box to summon a doctor.  That’s not going to happen quickly so Longman himself delivers the baby:  it’s a boy.  In the process, tears – and the scales – fall from Longman’s eyes and he turns back into a loving husband.  More good news follows.  In the early light of the following morning, Longman is informed by Hall, in a towpath conversation, that it’s now clear Professor Sharpey wasn’t a traitor after all.  Clear to James Kennaway, that is.

    The climax, in other words, shows true love trumping psychological manipulation.  Implausible as this is, The Mind Benders often shows high-quality acting transcending improbable plotting.  Hall’s assurance to Tate that, once Longman hears the tape-recording of the brainwashing session, he’ll see reason and instantly revert to his normal, uxorious self, not only sounds facile at the time but undermines the dreadful power of brainwashing on which the story depends (besides, Hall claims both advanced medical training and knowledge of indoctrination techniques).  Yet Bogarde makes it a startling highlight of the film when Longman, on hearing the recording, derisively explains that Hall has wrongly assumed he needed to be convinced of Oonagh’s worthlessness:  Longman says he already saw through and despised her.  You would think Oonagh would be shocked and angry on learning what Hall and Tate have done to her husband.  She’s neither yet Mary Ure’s melancholy (masochistic) acquiescence is touching.

    There’s more wrong with The Mind Benders than unsatisfactory plotting.  Dearden’s staging of the scene that follows the brainwashing episode – Longman lies outside the lab, waiting to be stretchered into a waiting ambulance while a crowd of students gawp – is plain stupid.  There’s a bad continuity problem in sequences involving a stray dog outside Annabelle’s houseboat:  it’s after dark but not in images that show the dog alone rather than with people.  Georges Auric’s score, as well as being overused, is too rich.  It doesn’t fit either the storyline or the film’s visual conception of Oxford, where dreaming spires are soon replaced by brutalist university science buildings.  Denys Coop’s black-and-white photography, which strengthens the atmosphere of menacing modernity, is a plus point, though – so is Dearden’s handling of the pleasant domestic hubbub in the first scene at the Longmans’.  (Their amusingly named children are Persephone, Paul, Peers [sic?] and Penny – their new baby brother will be Pedro.)  Wendy Craig is an asset, too.  The role of Annabelle is crudely conceived and overwritten, at least until she does her bit to help, but Craig’s playing of it confirms there was more to her as an actress than future roles in domestic TV sitcoms might lead you to assume.

    It’s Dirk Bogarde who makes the difference, though.  He had worked before with Basil Dearden – as long ago as The Blue Lamp (1950), more recently in Victim – but his work in The Mind Benders is on a different level.  Later in 1963, he would earn well-deserved plaudits in Joseph Losey’s The Servant (in which Wendy Craig is again good – in a much better role).  When I last saw The Servant, I described Bogarde’s performance as his ‘most inventive and enjoyable’.  I think that’s probably right – it’s more satisfying than his performance here because The Servant is a much more cogent film – but he’s still brilliant as Longman.  His in extremis acting in the sensory-deprivation sequence is a considerable feat; the horrible fluency of his abuse of Oonagh is even more amazing.  Bogarde is so credibly volatile that he keeps the film suspenseful right through to the sequence where Longman turns midwife:  his voice when he yells at Oonagh to ‘Push, push!’ could just as easily express loathing as urgency.  (By the way, I’ve called Longman by his surname throughout because that’s what his wife does.  She also calls Tate Tate.)

    The Mind Benders was a commercial and critical failure.  Its original trailer was fronted by Edgar Lustgarten, solemnly explaining that:

    ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the part of the programme where you normally see the trailer, advertising the next attraction to be screened at this theatre.  The film in question is The Mind Benders, which has an X certificate.  It’s so truly adult, so unusual and so exciting it would be spoiling things for you to show any of the scenes in advance unless we could include some of the controversial ones, which unfortunately we are forbidden to do in a trailer. …’

    This may now sound both OTT and quaint but there’s evidence to suggest it meant plenty at the time.  The BFI handout helpfully included some extracts from contemporary reviews in a range of publications, mostly Penelope Houston’s piece in Monthly Film Bulletin but also snippets from the Daily Telegraph and Daily Express.  None of the reviewers seems to like the film, notwithstanding Patrick Gibbs’s backhanded compliment in the Telegraph:  ‘… a stunning story, not to be missed by any connoisseur of the nasty or the absurd’.  The BFI handout also included Dirk Bogarde’s jaundiced recollections of the film’s reception in his 1978 memoir Snakes and Ladders:

    ‘The Mind Benders … was too far ahead of its time.  No one knew very much about brainwashing; no one really believed that it was possible … one headline which blared ‘Bogarde Thriller is Shabby and Nasty’ summed up the general reaction.  Another thumping failure in my brave new effort to disturb, illuminate and educate.  Someone was on the wrong track; it depressed me deeply that all the signs pointed towards myself. ‘       

    Perhaps brainwashing was widely seen in the early 1960s as a creature of paranoid fiction rather than a matter of political fact but that needn’t have prevented The Mind Benders from being a hit – like John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, which arrived in British cinemas just three months before Dearden’s film.  It’s more likely that viewers were uncomfortable with the ‘truly adult’ nature of The Mind Benders – expecting more Cold War espionage or scientists-playing-God thrills, and less emotionally distressing material, than is actually delivered.  Edgar Lustgarten’s prediction in the trailer that this is ‘a film you’ll remember and discuss for a long time to come’ proved wide of the mark.  I’d never even heard of it.  (I think it was much more suitably included in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Hidden Gems of British Cinema’ season at BFI than Green for Danger.)  Lustgarten wasn’t completely wrong, though.  This viewer’s prediction is that Dirk Bogarde will ensure I don’t forget The Mind Benders.

    2 October 2024

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