Tom Shkolnik (2012)
Tom Shkolnik, whose first feature this is, says in Sight & Sound that he wanted:
‘… to make a film about a London that I could recognise … about people who were poor but not starving, living on estates but not in council housing, who were foreign but not asylum seekers, black but not gang members, gay but not camp.’
He succeeds – or convinced me that he succeeds. I’ve never been on a night bus or in a London club late at night but I believed the scenes in The Comedian that take place in these locations – thanks to Shkolnik’s skilful staging and direction of his actors, especially Edward Hogg as the title character, Ed, through whose eyes the viewer experiences much of what’s on screen. The S&S reviewer, Ben Walters, compares The Comedian with, as well as movies about screwed-up comedians (or would-be comedians), ‘recent films taking a broadly naturalistic perspective on the emotional and psychological challenges of alienated late-capitalist identity’. I’m less convinced by this. Of course there are aspects of the Hogg character that reflect the time and place in which the story is happening: how Ed expresses his sexuality, for example, would have been different in the London of twenty years ago and might be different even today in Ed’s home city of Sheffield, to which he briefly returns to visit his family. If the economic weather was finer, thirty-two-year-old Ed might do better than working in a call centre, selling, or usually failing to sell, cancer insurance to women. But The Comedian is essentially a single-character study and Ed, who’s unable to get things to work out in either his private or his public life, seems more humanly credible than a product of his environment. He doesn’t have a personality disorder but it’s unhappily clear that his deep-seated selfishness and dissatisfaction make him sometimes petulant, sometimes incapable of rousing himself to feel any emotion at all. Ed’s failures, and their causes, are not unusual yet Shkolnik and Hogg make him individual.
Although Ed wants to break through on the stand-up comedy circuit, the film’s title is somewhat misleading. Not only is Ed not much of a comedian; there’s not even much of him trying to be one – just a couple of short routines: the first doesn’t go down a storm, the second is worse. Ed’s problem is that he’s not funny. His material isn’t bad but his shouty, aggressive performing style is rigid and alienating enough to exclude the possibility of laughter. (Although he does get a few titters: famous comedians of a different era talk on chat shows about the traumatising hostility of audiences, particularly on the Northern club circuit, but what Shkolnik shows here – it’s a real audience in a real comedy club – is closer to my experience of sitting in a theatre audience with people overeager to sound as if they’re enjoying themselves and, to put it more kindly, to encourage the performer.) Whether Ed’s style is attack-as-the-best-means-of-defence or an expression of underlying anger (or both) isn’t made clear, and it’s the more interesting for that.
It’s also particularly difficult here to separate the character from the actor. According to Ben Walters, Edward Hogg devised the material. It seems that his routine was inserted into the club line-up as if Hogg was a real stand-up – so that, according to Charles Gant’s piece in S&S about the film’s development, when Ed sits in the gents immediately after his routine and hears it rubbished by the club emcee, it was crushing for Hogg too. This experience, and what happens in Ed’s personal life immediately afterwards, are sufficient to put an end to the stand-up for the rest of the film but perhaps Ed will resume it (as with all good characters, you believe he has a life beyond the closing credits). In Sheffield, his family ask him to do a bit of comedy and he tells one dim, old joke which raises loyal chuckles. There are other opportunities, though, for the audience to see how amusing Ed can be offstage – most noticeably in the first sequence on a night bus where Nathan (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), a young(er) man who was in the comedy club audience and recognises Ed, starts talking to him. This is the start of a sexual relationship between Ed and Nathan (who paints) which produces the most dynamic scenes in The Comedian, including a second one on the upper deck of a bus. Some girls in seats nearby start up what seems at first a jokey conversation but then builds to a homophobic rant. The exchange focuses increasingly on two black characters, Nathan and his female adversary (Azara Meghie) and is a good example of Shkolnik’s success in showing people doing things that ring true but which, in terms of what you expect to see on screen, are fresh and surprising.
The bus journey is the end of the road for Ed’s relationships both with Nathan, who wants more from him emotionally, and with Ed’s flatmate Elisa (Elisa Lasowski), who desires him physically in a way that’s not reciprocated. Elisa is a French singer-songwriter who performs her material in pubs and has no better prospects than Ed has of making the big time. There’s a sequence in which they’re in bed together. Ed seems to find the affectionate proximity comforting but his sexual passion is reserved for Nathan. (The bed scene with Elisa takes place after Ed’s vigorous first night of sex with Nathan at the latter’s studio.) Ed swings both ways in an unusual way (again, unusual in terms of what you’re used to seeing at the cinema). He’s not exactly bisexual but he needs a close relationship with a woman as well as with a man. The detail of the personality that Edward Hogg creates is very persuasive. Ed is also capable of comedy at the call centre, when his manager Jamie (Jamie Baughan) gets him and his colleague Steven to practise a telephone sales pitch. The increasingly exasperated Jamie is infuriating to Ed largely because he’s not unreasonable – as when Ed angrily asks if he’s expected to look to be enjoying his boring job. Jamie replies that he’s not – but it’s work: does Ed expect to enjoy it? Ed’s realisation that Jamie has got a point intensifies his frustration and brings out his childishness. Jamie Baughan suggests that Jamie is aware of how boring he looks and sounds, and this adds to the complexity of the later call centre scenes. Steven is played by Steven Robertson – in a minor part, although he also features in crucial scenes away from the office and is good, as he was in Neds.
It will be obvious from the above that the characters are named for those playing them. I’m never keen on this – the implication that the actors are themselves seems pointless, even insulting to their creativity. All the cast in The Comedian are interesting to watch, even when something strikes you as wrong. One of the few performers I remember seeing before, Gerard Murphy, is striking as Ed’s father in the scene at the family home in Sheffield. Murphy’s hand movements as he reads to his son from a newspaper are oddly elaborate and distracting; all in all, this Independent reader seems not to go with the other members of Ed’s family. Yet there’s an unspoken connection between him and his son and the father’s incongruousness in his own home makes his son’s misfit quality seem inherited. In the film’s final sequence, as Ed takes a mini-cab ride home on his return from Sheffield to London, he chats with the driver (Nyasha Hatendi). Edward Hogg shows you Ed’s relief at relating for a short while to someone who he’s never going to see again. Then, as the conversation continues and gets deeper, Ed’s melancholy seeps back in and the driver’s words occasionally spark his hostility. Perhaps this sequence goes on a bit too long – it’s ten minutes out of only seventy-nine in toto and the driver’s words become gradually more resonant in a somewhat too conclusive way – but it gives Hogg a climactic opportunity to express Ed’s shifting emotions, and he takes it.
There’s hardly a moment when Ed doesn’t seem to have divided feelings. When, for example, he and Nathan take a bath together Ed shows a mixture of physical tenderness and incipient disappointment. Although the dialogue has been developed from extended improvisation (there was no script as such), this is a case where I can accept the actors’ searching for what to say next, and sometimes failing to say something that makes sense, because it chimes with the characters’ uncertainty. In a rather similar way, the film has a street-cred that goes beyond the fact that it was made on a low budget and that Tom Shkolnik insisted on one-take-only throughout. I especially liked his use of neon lights in darkness, whether inside in a club or outside in the London streets or, finally, in a virtual combination of the two, as Ed sits in the back of the minicab. The warmth of the lights on the road ahead and the anonymity of the darkness are appealing but Ed, as he looks into them, can’t see where he’s going.
1 June 2013
