Claire Oakley (2019)
First time back in a cinema since mid-March this year, I watched Make Up, writer-director Claire Oakley’s debut feature, at the Curzon Richmond. Social distancing wasn’t a problem. There were only six other people in the audience …
That seemed apt enough for a film set in an out-of-season seaside resort, an inherently promising setting for a psychological thriller or mystery. It allows a storyteller to suggest that a place like this must be empty in order for its disturbing essential character, concealed when tourist dwellings and amusement arcades are full of people and noise, to emerge. Oakley sets the action in Cornwall, in a windswept, nearly deserted holiday park close to the seashore. Eighteen-year-old Ruth (Molly Windsor) comes to stay with her boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn), who regularly works at the park during low season, helping with the annual winter clean-up and redecoration of static caravans. There are sights and sounds to unsettle Ruth as soon as she arrives, one dark afternoon or evening. While she and Tom are making love that night, she’s disturbed by a noise from outside that she’s never heard before: Tom explains it’s foxes barking. It’s not long before Ruth suspects that her boyfriend of three years has been cheating on her. She notices a smudge of lipstick on a mirror, a long red hair on one of Tom’s T-shirts.
As well as doing odd jobs, Tom enjoys surfing but Ruth won’t be joining him in that. She can’t swim, has never even paddled in the sea before. The site manager Shirley (Lisa Palfrey), who agrees to give Ruth a temporary cleaning job, tells her the sea is ‘a great healer’. It rid Shirley of her fear of dogs – just as well, in view of the threatening Alsatian resident at the park with his Dolge Orlick-ish owner Kai (Theo Barklem-Biggs), who works with Tom. Another member of the small work force is the relatively very glamorous Jade (Stefanie Martini), whose hobby is make-up and hairstyling. When she offers to give wan Ruth a makeover, Tom warns his girlfriend to be careful: Jade ‘has a reputation’. Ruth, meanwhile, continues to be unnerved – by Kai’s sexist foul language, by a lipstick kiss-shape, just like the one on Tom’s mirror, which appears on the windows of caravans that have been fumigated and sealed up for the winter. She also sees a young woman in one of these caravans and tells Shirley, who assures Ruth she can’t have. Despite her total lack of saltwater experience, Ruth is also oddly keen on venturing into the sea, which figures prominently in her dreams and nightmares too.
With the help of her DP Nick Cooke and sound designer Anya Przygoda, Claire Oakley certainly succeeds in creating ominous atmosphere. The carefully composed visual and sonic effects, which tend to upstage the characters, raise early suspicions that Make Up is primarily a stylistic exercise but Oakley makes you curious how she’ll resolve the puzzling goings-on: is Ruth experiencing the paranormal or paranoia? About halfway through this quite short (86-minute) film, you start to realise it’s neither. This will be the story of Ruth’s sexual awakening, her discovery that she’s in love not with Tom but with Jade. Oakley’s strategy depends crucially on making Ruth a blank canvas in terms of both backstory and Molly Windsor’s playing of her (good actress as Windsor may well be). At one point, Tom tells his glum-looking girlfriend he’s sorry if the place isn’t what she expected it to be. Ruth replies, in her usual toneless voice, that she didn’t expect it to be anything (or words to that effect). This is only too easy to believe.
Ruth, whose first boyfriend Tom is, seems never to have had an inkling of her true sexuality. It’s clear too that she’s never seen a film featuring a stereotyped lesbian character. If she had, she’d have realised immediately, thanks to Stefanie Martini’s telegraphic acting, what’s in Jade’s mind. Ruth does get the message when she goes to Jade’s caravan for a drink one evening; she leaves hurriedly because she fears Jade is making a pass at her. (Ruth goes out into pouring rain and a howling gale, the weather outside the caravan matching the emotional turbulence going on inside.) After one of her sessions in the sea Ruth takes a shower and hears sounds of passionate lovemaking in one of the adjacent stalls. Oakley quickly cuts from this to Ruth’s return to her and Tom’s caravan but you get a distinct sense that the narrative will return to the showers, to describe further what Ruth witnessed there. And so it does: Ruth gets down on all fours to spy, under the partition between cubicles, on two writhing, naked female bodies.
It’s no surprise either that Oakley chooses to show this at the point at which it’s time for Ruth to accept her true sexual nature. In the closing scenes, Tom angrily gets the message and their relationship appears to end. Ruth goes to Jade’s empty caravan and puts on the fur jacket hanging there, along with a long, red-haired wig and face make-up. She leaves the caravan and wanders into an after-dark beach party, where a huge bonfire blazes. There she meets Jade, who is entranced by Ruth’s cosmetic transformation. The following morning, in the film’s closing shot, Ruth steps confidently, smilingly (thank goodness) into the sea. As Shirley cured her cynophobia in the briny so has Ruth conquered her fear-of-who-she-really-is.
Claire Oakley’s use of the sea, the winter season and spooky psychodrama tropes as a means of exploring the upheaval of surprising sexuality might have seemed inventive if Make Up had been made a decade or more ago. As a film of today, it left me thinking: is that all? The turn that Oakley’s story takes seems thoroughly conventional now – as do reviewers’ reactions to it (100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes so far). The new(ish) critical orthodoxy extends to the reception of the main male character, even if Oakley may not mean to be so unkind to Tom and even though Joseph Quinn plays him well. In her review (‘…a thrillingly queer tangle in a Cornish campsite’) on the BFI website, Rebecca Harrison includes among the indignities to which Ruth is subjected ‘watching Tom eat spaghetti sandwiches with grotesque abandon’. A few years ago a remark like that in a film review might have been condemned (and reasonably so) as a deplorably snotty comment on the character’s social background and tastes. This aspect of Tom is nowadays overridden by the fact that he’s a young man who has sex with his girlfriend also ‘with grotesque abandon’ – without noticing, let alone caring, that she’s not enjoying it.
6 August 2020
