Chris Petit (1979)
It’s soon clear how important the music is going to be. We’re used to seeing what’s featured on a film soundtrack in the closing credits. Here the details are given at the start, immediately after the names of the three main actors. This is a co-production between the BFI and Wim Wenders’ Road Movies Filmproduktion company; you get an early sense that the German strand of the film is going to count for a lot too. The soundtrack includes Kraftwerk. In a prologue the camera moves round an empty flat – including a study where the books are upstaged by handwritten words pinned to the bedroom wall – ‘We are the children of Fritz Lang and Wernher von Braun’, a Kraftwerk lyric. David Bowie sings ‘Heroes’, the opening number, in German as well as English. There are various other kinds of cultural communication and dependency in evidence in Radio On: news and sport bulletins on the radio; porn films; television screens (even if they have nothing to show: sets tend to be left on after transmission has ended or where the reception isn’t good enough to supply a picture). The protagonist Robert’s London flat is above a cinema; and ‘Radio On’, at the climax to the opening credits, repeats in neon lights among the commercial names that illuminate the night-time cityscape.
Robert is a disc jockey – according to Wikipedia, he works ‘at a radio station based on the United Biscuits Network, which broadcast to factories owned by United Biscuits’. I soon forgot that he was a DJ, though. This is partly because we don’t see much of him at work, partly because, when we do, Robert speaks in such a glum monotone – as he does wherever he is and whoever he’s talking to – that when he does play records it seems an expression of his personality rather than his job. (He reads out a request for ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ but chooses to put on something ‘better’.) About half an hour into Radio On, Robert learns from a phone call – it’s never made clear from whom – that his brother, who lived in Bristol, has been found dead in his bath. (When the camera goes into the bathroom of the flat during the prologue, there’s a brief shot of the bath and of two hairy legs from the knees downwards.) Even while Robert’s in London, he does a lot of driving around – not, it seems, because he needs to get anywhere but because he’s uncomfortable staying put. Once he gets the news about his brother and sets off for Bristol, he has a reason to be on the move, and Radio On becomes the road movie that Chris Petit has, from the start, seemed anxious for it to be. It seems that Robert’s brother committed suicide and that he may have been part of a Bristol porn ring that more than one radio news report refers to. But the succession of soulless buildings and motorways that feature in the film – shot in black and white by Martin Schäfer (who was also Wenders’ cameraman at the time) – and the lack of any sustained connection between Robert and the various people he meets suggest a larger sense of degeneration.
In a piece from 2008[1] Chris Petit writes as follows:
‘… It is now nearly thirty years since Radio On, and its DVD release last month confirmed it as [a] rare example of a European model in contemporary English cinema and a defining picture of post-war disenchantment. At the time it was described as ‘a film without a cinema’ but to my mind it never really was an English film and exactly this point is made in an essay accompanying the DVD: ‘There are long stretches when we could be in some comparable backwater in Belgium, or France or Germany. Industrial estate, dockside, car park. Rotterdam or the Ruhr.’ … I always thought of Radio On as more of a report than a dramatic narrative, about the way things looked and the music we played, about cultural climate and weather, buildings and landscape, a sense of alien record.’
Petit is certainly determined to establish the film’s ‘European’ credentials through the technical and stylistic choices he makes but Radio On, viewed at this distance in time, feels as if its subject is Britain specifically. What Petit, who wrote the screenplay with Heidi Adolph, couldn’t have known at the time was how pivotal a year 1979 would prove to be for the country from a much longer perspective. In retrospect, Radio On not only evokes a place at the end of its tether but anticipates the bleaker picture that many people have of the decade that followed Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in Downing Street.
David Beames as Robert is fine as a camera subject but once he speaks he sounds phony. It’s clear that Petit has encouraged Beames to go for deliberate lack of expression and the effect is artificial rather than anomic. Petit may have wanted the British actors to emulate the less histrionic style he associates with good continental European acting; it’s surely no coincidence that the German cast members Liza Kreuzer (as Ingrid, a young German woman separated from her English husband and their child) and Sabina Michael (Ingrid’s unsympathetic mother-in-law) underplay more naturally. On the rare occasions that Petit gives a character plenty to say, the acting is embarrassing – the worst example is a monologue from an aggressive army deserter (Andrew Byatt) to whom Robert gives a lift. Even perfectly good people like Sandy Ratcliff, as the woman Robert’s brother lived with, sound forced and hollow. Sting makes a cameo appearance as an Eddie Cochran aficionado. He plays to the camera too much and reminds you why his acting career didn’t last long.
Radio On is sometimes pointlessly clever – one particular example. Ingrid apologises for the unfriendly behaviour of the other young woman she’s with when Robert first meets them, telling him that her friend ‘doesn’t like men right now’. Robert asks how you say that in German and, when Ingrid tells him, he explains that, ‘There isn’t a word for it in English – only for a man who hates women’. This is wrong: the English word for a man-hater is misandrist. Of course it could be Robert rather than his creator who doesn’t know that but I’d put money on Chris Petit’s expecting the audience to feel that this supposed lacuna in the language says something nationally significant. In terms of its look, though, the film is impressive, even when compositions sit on the screen wanting to be admired – sometimes Petit holds a shot so long that he seems to pull you into being a part of what you’re seeing. The music is powerfully evocative. I especially liked the moment when Petit cuts away from Robert at his DJ station to the sound of the record that he’s put on merging with the noises of the factory in which it’s playing.
25 July 2012
[1] http://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-4-issue-1-autumn-winter-2008/germany-and-england-england-and-germany-proposal-for-a-film/
