Bill Forsyth (1984)
Bill Forsyth is unfailingly benign towards the people in his films and has a gift for making them, and their situations, genuinely eccentric. Both Gregory’s Girl and Local Hero are set in essentially or actually small worlds – a secondary school and a fishing village respectively – and Forsyth makes the eccentricity in these communities feel organic. Comfort and Joy is set in Glasgow. Its protagonist, Alan ‘Dicky’ Bird, is a disc jockey on local radio but you’re never in doubt that he lives in a big city. It’s also Forsyth’s home city and he’s no less benign in his treatment of the place than he is of its citizens. It helps, in this respect, that the story takes place in the days leading up to Christmas but the traffic lights and headlights are as warm as the seasonal illuminations. As lit by Chris Menges, the arterial roads and suburban streets on a December afternoon give off a glow that recalls the enchanted dusks of Local Hero. Alan’s girlfriend, Maddy, walks out on him at the start of the film and this rupture in his personal life sharpens his awareness of the crappy aspects of his job. Alan, who looks to be in his late thirties, wants to do something different from his five-days-a-week breakfast show (the early Bird …) – he’s tired of the jokes and jingles and playing Scottish favourites. When he finds himself caught up in the middle of Glasgow’s ice cream wars, Alan thinks he’s got a subject for a radio documentary – a serious piece of work. The set-up is promising but Comfort and Joy misfires. Even though Forsyth’s love of Glasgow is clearly authentic, his placing of the story in it feels artificial.
The ice cream wars element is a particular problem. It sounds a comically ludicrous idea and the violence in the film is pretty farcical: only the bonnet of Alan’s car gets seriously (and repeatedly) hurt – upturned vanilla cornets spoil the velour upholstery inside. Bill Forsyth may have been unlucky with timing: Comfort and Joy was released just a few months after six members of one of the ice cream vendor families involved in the actual vendetta died in an arson attack. Forsyth must have been aware, though, in making the film, that the real disputes were a turf war involving the sale of drugs as well as ice cream in Glasgow’s East End. He emphasises the cartoon quality of the violence and intimidation by making one of the families (or, as it turns out, one branch of the same family) resoundingly Italian but the spoof Godfather sequences – like one in a late-night café that features an argument over who gets the day’s last-remaining kunzle cake – are pretty lame. There’s also a fundamental problem of structure in the screenplay. The film looks set to be a character study but, like Alan’s life, is getting nowhere fast until the ice-cream feud arrives to give them both a focus. Good actor as he is, Bill Paterson, who’s in virtually every scene as Alan, is playing a man who, once he’s stopped having dreams of Maddy coming back, doesn’t know what he wants – except that it’s something different from what he has. Alan doesn’t have a tunnel-vision obsession like John Gordon Sinclair’s Gregory or a romantic and professional dilemma like Peter Riegert’s Mac in Local Hero. In the last twenty minutes or so of Comfort and Joy, Forsyth seems to have given up on developing Alan. It’s as if the writer-director, as well as his main character, has decided the best he can hope for is to resolve the differences between the ice cream combatants. Forsyth/Alan succeed in this. One of the factions has a sideline selling chips: peace breaks out when Alan persuades them to collaborate with the other faction to produce ice-cream fritters. Even so, the film leaves you feeling disappointed. This is not because it hasn’t delivered a happy ending for Alan (he’s got the recipe for the fritters and cuts a deal for a hefty percentage of the profits) but because it’s almost lost interest in him. In the final scene, his documentary ambitions presumably abandoned, Alan has switched to the Christmas afternoon shift at the radio station, getting his listeners to believe there’s a party going on in the nearly deserted building.
The relentlessness of jingle bells – in the form of Christmas muzak in city centre stores, radio commercials and ice-cream van chimes – provides an effective soundtrack and Mark Knopfler’s melancholy saxophone music a nice contrast; but the radio news bulletins are an uneasy confection. They describe increasingly vulnerable Christmas truces in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East – but in countries of those regions with made-up names. As with the gelato violence, Forsyth seems to be putting something unpleasant in wry quote marks and the effect is uncomfortable for the wrong reason. In the opening sequence of Comfort and Joy, a woman with pre-Raphaelite red hair is shoplifting. A man is watching her but he turns out not to be the store detective you first take him to be. This is Alan and, when he follows the woman out of the shop, he says to her, ‘You’ll be the death of me, Maddy’. Although this is a good capper, I’ve a resistance to ditsy, delightful kleptomaniacs (this film appeared at least warm on the heels of Arthur); and although Eleanor David looks spectacularly beautiful as Maddy – she seems like Alan’s fantasy even when she’s really there – she’s required to undergo not so much a mood swing as a character change in order to decide to walk out on him, after four years together and just as she was about to decorate the Christmas tree. The scene of her instant departure, with the stunned Alan helping carry Maddy’s stuff out of his flat, has a few amusing details but they’re describing such a contrived comic set-piece that it’s hard to enjoy them fully.
The offices of the radio station – with their eerie combinations of glass cubicles and windows onto the big city, of inane noise and unpeopled quiet – are a more promising locale for Forsyth than the world outside. In one little scene there, Alan is recording a voiceover for a stupid commercial and a young colleague, Keith (an actor called Alistair Campbell), is directing him with straight-faced discrimination. This is nicely off-centre but Bill Forsyth is sometimes off-target too. One of my favourite moments in Local Hero comes when Mac, about to fly back to America, is asked by one of the villagers for his autograph. The locals in Comfort and Joy keep asking Dicky Bird for his autograph too but this is Glasgow rather than Ferness and Dicky is a voice on the radio. The cast also includes Roberto Bernardi, Rikki Fulton, Clare Grogan, Patrick Malahide and Alex Norton.
6 February 2014
