What If (Max and Dania)
Swimmer (Lynne Ramsay)
A Running Jump (Mike Leigh)
The Odyssey (Asif Kapadia)
(2012)
Joe (George Sargeant), a white teenager who lives in a block of London council flats, is ready to be sucked into the warped ethos of local gang culture. The television is broadcasting the London riots of August 2011; parents are being warned to keep an eye on their kids. But Joe’s mother is in a narcotised drowse and he gives up on his school homework, Kipling’s ‘If’, and goes out to demand money from an Asian boy – following the example of an older white boy who had demanded money with menaces from Joe. After being shown up in front of his girlfriend (Alexis Simone), Joe smashes up the potted plants carefully tended by an elderly black man in the neighbourhood. Then Noel Clarke materialises. Good-looking and sharply dressed, Clarke seems like visiting royalty but in fact is much more: according to the closing credits, he’s been playing ‘The Angel’. He speaks the lines from ‘If’ to Joe with thudding (often misplaced) emphasis, mangling them in the process. The Angel also shows Joe the positive cultural energies of the local community, as demonstrated in dance and music and roller-skating. What If, directed by Max (Giwa) and Dania (Pasquini) from a screenplay which the latter wrote with Joshua St Johnston, seems to say that you can’t expect to be morally strengthened by reading ‘If’ just as part of your English homework but you might be – and you might also come to notice the vibrant contemporary culture under your nose – if a celebrity/demigod turns up and takes you through the poem line by line. This rather depressing message is evidently meant to be inspiring. The performers are uninteresting and the ideas of Max and Dania pitifully unimaginative. The film is shot in black and white, except that the odd detail in a frame will occasionally be coloured: for example, a rainbow! At the end of the film (a very long twenty-five minutes), as Clarke reprises ‘If’, the whole thing turns from monochrome to colour.
Lynne Ramsay’s Swimmer contains some brilliant and beguiling images and is even shorter (eighteen minutes) but it still verges on outstaying its welcome. Early on someone on a riverbank mentions the attractions of being invisible and I wondered if that was what the lone male swimmer (Tom Litten) was going to be – the focus of our attention but unseen by other people on screen, as he passes through various British waterways and landscapes. There’s an oneiric quality to some of the shots of the swimmer moving through water that’s both translucent and viscous: it gives you the sense of how cleaving water can feel in a dream. But there’s no core to the film; the swimmer gets into underwater physical combat because …well, because it looks spectacular. The mélange of words and music on the soundtrack – Tom Courtenay’s voice from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, ‘The Very Thought of You’ playing as the swimmer and Ramsay head into Dennis Potter country – adds up to nothing that I could understand. The director of photography is Natasha Braier.
In the discussion of the four films on BBC’s The Review Show, Paul Morley said of Mike Leigh’s A Running Jump that he found its weedy sitcom quality almost appealing (or words to that effect). What Morley didn’t say was how weedy Leigh’s piece is compared with the actual sitcom that seems to have inspired it. There’s a moment when the three main male characters are standing together: Perry (Eddie Marsan), a dodgy dealer; Gary (Lee Ingleby), an amiable nerd who’s about to buy a second hand car from this man; Perry’s father (Sam Kelly), a garrulous cab driver. They might be Del, Rodney and Grandad/Uncle Albert in Only Fools and Horses but they’re very poor relations. The old man is especially wearying, partly because Sam Kelly is an instinctive and relentless overactor, partly because Leigh gives him such tired things to say about football and horse racing. (Tired or wrong: Grandad tells Gary that Lester Piggott ‘was very short – well, of course they all are’. Piggott, as anyone with a passing acquaintance with racing would know, was exceptionally tall for a flat jockey. Taller than Mike Leigh, I’d guess.) The women include Perry’s generic daughters (Danielle Bird and Nichole Bird) and his wife Debbie (Samantha Spiro), a fitness instructor recycled from the flamenco teacher in Happy-Go-Lucky and whose spiel is verbally and vocally overcoloured in a desperate attempt to compensate for the thinness of the role. Perry never stops talking, at high speed, and A Running Jump is always on the move too. The East End dynamism is forced, though; Eddie Marsan’s edginess comes across as anxiety on the actor’s part rather than as something essential to the character, although Marsan’s natural eccentricity is some consolation. Dick Pope gives everything a bright, sunny look – outdoors and in the dayglo-coloured interiors of the family home – and there’s one final, more interesting change of tone, when smoke belches from the bonnet of Gary’s recent purchase from Perry and the camera pulls back and up from the bridge where the car’s stopped, reducing Gary to a small, lonely figure in an otherwise humanless scene. All in all, though, Mike Leigh, like Perry, seems to be trying to sell the audience a used motor. A Running Jump is shoddy.
By the time I watched Asif Kapadia’s The Odyssey, we were deep into a competition perversely appropriate to the films’ Olympic raison d’être: which would be the worst? After the other three, Kapadia’s effort comes as a relief but no more than a relief. The Odyssey is essentially a series of aerial views of London and a relay of voices commenting on the city, the changing morale of Londoners, and the impending Olympics – from 6 July 2005, the day the Games were awarded, up to the present. Many of the God’s-eye-view shots, photographed by Adam Dale, are wonderful; and complemented by news footage of Jacques Rogge announcing the good news from Singapore, of 7/7, and so on. This is fine, and it’s refreshing that the voices (which belong to Steve Cram among others) never turn into talking heads. What’s dull about The Odyssey are the references to Olympic history with clips of Jesse Owens, Cassius Clay (as he then was) and Nadia Comăneci – the usual suspects when it comes to a limited choice of highlights. The clips of them are used as if to express something fundamental about the Olympic Games but, in truth, they’re filler. The Odyssey doesn’t eventually amount to more than a superior promotional piece about London 2012. In The Review Show discussion, Paul Morley also said something to the effect that these were films made by committee. It’s certainly true that the four pieces reflect the project they’re part of – made to order rather than to express something the film-makers felt compelled to say.
July 2012