Peter Medak (1968)
It’s so late 1960s that it made me occasionally nostalgic but Negatives is a silly and eventually boring film, which spends its last half hour refusing to end. Theo (Peter McEnery) runs his ailing father’s ailing business – a London antique shop – while the old man (Maurice Denham) lies dying in hospital (in the Mary Celeste wing). To try and breathe life into his relationship with his partner Vivien (Glenda Jackson), Theo and she dress up and pretend to be Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve (or sometimes Belle, the wife that Crippen murdered). These routines are mostly futile: the ball-breaking woman scathingly mocks the subdued, melancholy man, and this isn’t acting in Edwardian character – it reveals Theo and Vivien’s own sexual identities and feelings about each other. Then a German photographer called Reingard (Diane Cilento) appears on the scene. There’s a brief suggestion of lesbian attraction between her and Vivien but Reingard’s principal intentions are evidently to (a) take pictures of Theo and Vivien’s life, (b) suggest a different fantasy persona for Theo and (c) destroy his relationship with Vivien. Does Theo realise, asks Reingard, that he bears a striking resemblance to Manfred von Richthofen? Peter McEnery looks nothing like the photographs of the Red Baron that Reingard shows him and Theo’s metamorphosis takes time to get going: it’s delayed, for example, until Theo and Reingard have played a showy scene in which they visit Crippen and the other waxworks in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s (which is conveniently deserted). But by the closing stages of Negatives, Theo, his hair cut short by Reingard, is wearing German military uniform and has rescued a Gipsy Moth plane from the scrapyard and painted it red with iron crosses. There’s no need to say much more about the script, which Peter Everett adapted, with Roger Lowry, from Everett’s novel, except that the power-games- and-construction-of-identities themes must have been old hat even when the film was made. The only surprises are that the source material is a novel rather than a stage play and that the significance of Theo’s father’s death in the scheme of things isn’t as obvious as you expect it to be. It doesn’t trigger a definite change in Theo; he merely wanders round a sylvan graveyard, looking a little unhappier than usual. In other words, the plot could manage without the father – he’s just vaguely Freudian filler.
There’s a somewhat unfortunate correspondence between the power balance of the characters and that of the actors. Peter McEnery very occasionally surprises with a flash of anger but his Theo is underwhelming – he isn’t quietly fascinating – whereas Diane Cilento and Glenda Jackson have histrionic energy to burn. This was Jackson’s second cinema role, after Marat/Sade (this isn’t counting her uncredited brief appearance in This Sporting Life), and she must have been a startling presence. More than forty years later, she still is, especially in her vocal power, but, as Pauline Kael pointed out in the mid-1970s, Glenda Jackson, for all her great abilities, soon became a self-parody of her most salient characteristics – a fluent but relentless vocal rhythm, snarling stridency, what she does with her tongue and teeth. The combined effect of these idiosyncrasies is that she seems to exude sexual tension from every pore. Even so, Jackson shows much greater emotional variety than Diane Cilento, who’s competent but monotonous. The heavily accented English underlines the sense of Cilento’s putting on a turn; in spite of her good looks, she sometimes suggests a man in drag. (This may be meant to resonate with the let’s-pretend theme of Negatives but I doubt it somehow.) Maurice Denham is good, as usual. With Billy Russell as an elderly man who helps out at the antiques shop and who, until close to the end, is remarkably indulgent of Theo’s behaviour. There are cameos from Norman Rossington (an auctioneer) and Stephen Lewis (a scrapyard dealer). The sound is distinctive in its insistent highlights – hair clippers, plane engines, and so on: it gets on your nerves as much as Theo’s. The music by Basil Kirchin isn’t as unconventional as some of his other output might lead you to expect.
12 August 2013
