Richard Billingham (2018)
When a film-maker opens with a shot of a fly buzzing round a naked light bulb, it’s often a hint of grim social realism to follow. So it is with Ray & Liz but the fly isn’t the only insect in evidence in writer-director Richard Billingham’s portrait of his upbringing on a Black Country council estate, and insects aren’t the only part of the animal kingdom the film features. There are different layers of menagerie. A portrait of a tiger is among several pieces of art on the walls of the family home; materfamilias Liz attempts a jigsaw that’s a picture of tigers too and drinks from a mug with a fox on it. There’s always a dog in the Billinghams’ flat, high up in a high-rise; at different times, their other household pets include a budgie, a hamster, a rabbit and snails. When Richard’s younger brother Jason skives off school, he visits a zoo, where a giraffe takes centre stage. When Jason stays overnight in the more comfortable and comforting surroundings of a friend’s home, a pattern of jolly exotic beasts adorns the bedroom curtains.
Then there are the human animals. In the closing conversation between him and Liz, the alcoholic Ray describes himself as ‘happy as a pig in shit’ – for as long, he says, as his friend Sid keeps drawing dole on his behalf and bringing bottles of home brew to the flat where Ray, now living apart from Liz, spends his days, mostly in bed. An earlier, much longer sequence describes the calm bestiality of the couple’s sociopathic lodger, Will. Ray and Liz go out, leaving the two young children in the care of Ray’s brother Lol, who is like a big kid himself – he’s seriously overweight, evidently has learning difficulties. Will eggs the babysitter on to sample each of the various types of alcohol available in the flat. When Lol passes out, Will daubs the infant Jason’s face in shoe polish and puts a carving knife in his hand. Ray and Liz return to find Lol still out cold. Before he got drunk, he described his sister-in-law to Will as having ‘a bit of Nazi in her’ and Liz, enraged by what’s gone on in her absence, uses a shoe to bash and bash again Lol’s insensible head. In later scenes, Billingham shows dog pee drenching an official-looking brown envelope arrived through the letterbox, as well as rabbit droppings on the sofa; in the standout excretory image, after the barely conscious Lol has thrown up, the family dog pads over to lap at the puddle of vomit.
This is Richard Billingham’s first feature film. He’s made shorts before but his reputation is chiefly as a photographer and his parents have been prominent in that side of his work too: according to Wikipedia, Billingham ‘is best known for the photography book Ray’s A Laugh (1996), which documents the life of his alcoholic father Ray, and obese, heavily tattooed mother, Liz’. Visual compositions dominate the first half of Ray & Liz, which is largely uneventful in terms of plot. When something does happen, it tends to happen deliberately though sometimes to absorbing effect – as, for example, when Ray and Liz are asleep in bed in the middle of the day and Richard encourages Jason to pour chilli powder into their father’s gaping mouth. The spoonful of powder starts to tip as if in slow motion towards its target. Billingham’s insistent description of domestic squalor, punctuated by emotional brutality, seems designed to compel and repel at the same time. For three people, in an audience of around twenty in Curzon Bloomsbury’s Minema, the balance clearly swung too far in the direction of repulsion (and/or boredom).
My immediate reaction was to envy these walkouts but I felt I should stay with Ray & Liz and was glad that I did, chiefly because of how much it changes in the second half, when it gradually becomes Jason’s story. Elder brother Richard, in comparison, is less a participant in what’s happening than an observer and a recorder – literally a recorder when he hands his mother, after her assault on her brother-in-law, audiocassette proof that Will was the prime mover in the debacle. The increasing focus on a vulnerable, ill-treated child makes the narrative more familiar and, to be honest, less uncomfortable because you sympathise unreservedly with the little boy. It’s harder to do so with the adults, in spite of their materially deprived circumstances. This is Thatcher’s Britain but Billingham makes it difficult to see his unemployed parents as representative victims of a political regime: they are, in the context of the film, feckless like no one else Their flat’s décor and appliances do suggest the family’s standard of living has declined but there’s little to suggest that that has changed Ray or Liz as people. The nasty Will comes over as naturally vicious rather than the product of socio-economic circumstance.
Although aware that Ray & Liz had had mostly good reviews, I was surprised to find consensus in the ones I read after seeing the film that, to quote Wendy Ide in the Observer, ‘it’s made with as much love as anger’, particularly in relation to the portrayal of the mother. For this viewer, the things Liz does and says that registered most strongly were her reaction to Richard’s secret recording and to seeing Jason again after he’s stayed a couple of nights at his friend’s. Deciding to ignore the audiocassette evidence, she unspools the tape and it ‘piles up around her ankles like Rapunzel hair’ (Ryan Gilbey, New Statesman). Out for an uncharacteristic walk together, she and Ray bump into Jason and the other boy playing in parkland. Liz grumpily asks where her son’s been in recent days, without evident concern or interest in the answer. She and Ray are wheeling a pram and the camera cuts to its passenger – the family’s pet rabbit. Both these instances, in other words, provide eye-catching, verging on surreal images but they aren’t enough to distract attention from the implications of Liz’s behaviour.
The moments where the title characters are presented sympathetically are ones in which they’re virtually disengaged from the narrative and from other people. There are repeated shots of Liz working on her jigsaw. In the final sequence, solitary Ray shows he’s not really as happy as a pig in shit: he weeps silently, as a radio plays Dusty Springfield’s ‘Some of Your Lovin’’. These more compassionate glimpses of Ray and Liz are also the more conventional elements of the film. Liz’s multi-coloured floral dress and the tones of the jigsaw pieces are a striking combination but the metaphorical sense of the image is hardly original: failing to complete a jigsaw signals trying vainly to puzzle out your life and get it to fit together. Billingham isn’t above cliché: I didn’t include in the list of zoological details above the wildlife programmes showing on the flat’s television – a by now overused analogue to goings-on in the human jungle.
Judging from the ages of the youngsters playing Richard and Jason, the larger part of the film covers a period of approaching ten years – presumably one end of the 1980s to the other. (Callum Slater is the toddler Jason and Joshua Millard-Lloyd his older incarnation; Jacob Tuton is the young boy Richard and Sam Plant the teenage version.) I wasn’t sure how far into the future the minority of scenes involving Ray and Liz after their separation were meant to be taking place. As with Richard and Jason, Billingham uses two pairs of actors to play his parents. Unlike with the children, you don’t accept, at a realistic level, that Ella Smith would age into Deirdre Kelly or Justin Salinger into Patrick Romer. Billingham maybe doesn’t intend that you should; it’s confusing nevertheless that Kelly looks only a few years older than Smith. The cast also includes Tony Way (Lol), Sam Gittins (Will) and Richard Ashton (Sid). Ray & Liz has drawn comparisons with the work of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh but some of the acting here is relatively primitive. Billingham does get a very expressive and quietly convincing performance, though, from Joshua Millard-Lloyd.
14 March 2019
