Carol Morley (2022)
Audrey Amiss, born in Sunderland in 1933, trained as an artist at the Royal Academy in the 1950s but didn’t complete the course due to mental illness. She continued to make art throughout her life, periods of which were spent in psychiatric hospitals, although Amiss also had secretarial jobs and travelled abroad. Her creative work wasn’t recognised during her lifetime. When, after her death, her niece and nephew cleared the Clapham home where she lived a reclusive existence in her later years, they discovered ‘hundreds of sketchbooks, scrapbooks, photograph albums, account books, record books and log books, spanning from [sic] Amiss’s early life up until the day of her death on 10 July 2013’ (Wikipedia). The following year, her family donated this material in its entirety to the Wellcome Collection, where the archive has now been catalogued and can be viewed online. Typist Artist Pirate King – the intriguing title is what Amiss entered as occupations on her passport – describes itself as ‘inspired by the life and times of Audrey Amiss’.
Writer-director Carol Morley seems well qualified to explore this curious figure. Morley made her film-making name with Dreams of a Life (2011), a formally inventive and absorbing drama-documentary, which pieced together the identity of another eventually solitary and sadly overlooked woman. The puzzle of Typist Artist Pirate King, though, turns out to be not who Audrey Amiss was but the choices that Morley has made in this fictionalised portrait of her. It’s hard to gauge exactly how old the film’s Audrey is meant to be – perhaps early sixties? (Monica Dolan, who plays her, is in her mid-fifties but has been made up to look older.) Audrey, in her London flat, makes herself unpopular with the people upstairs by banging on the ceiling at all hours in protest: she imagines her neighbours are sexually abusing her by remote control. She insults and tries the patience of Sandra (Kelly Macdonald), the care worker who visits her regularly. Audrey is suddenly compelled to undertake an urgent mission – to get her work exhibited as never before. She’s read about the ‘local’ art gallery concerned in the newspaper; Sandra gamely agrees to drive her there. Once they’ve been on the road for a little while, Audrey reveals the gallery is in Sunderland (‘it’s local to me!’).
Morley thus launches the pair into a road movie – unusual to the extent that Audrey is an unusual personality but structurally familiar. The principals eventually arrive in Sunderland to find that their destination closed down years ago. (When Sandra expresses regret that she didn’t bother to check the date of Audrey’s newspaper cutting about the art gallery, it sounds a bit like Carol Morley admitting to shaky plotting.) Once Audrey’s quest for belated recognition is thwarted, a quest for reconciliation and healing moves centre stage. Audrey claims her married sister Dorothy will have nothing to do with her; Sandra urges her to try to mend fences; when they pay Dorothy (Gina McKee) a call, it emerges that Audrey’s the one who broke off contact. From an early stage in the narrative, there’s mention of a pivotal traumatic event in Audrey’s youth, when she was nineteen – a fall from rocky, hilly terrain in which she sustained serious injury. In the climax to the story, she revisits the site of the accident – accompanied by Dorothy, Sandra and Gabe (Kieran Bew), a Geordie taxi driver who kindly provides transport once Sandra’s car is out of action. Audrey re-experiences emotionally what happened there decades ago. In the process, she appears to realise for the first time that Dorothy wasn’t to blame. Morley’s reliance on tropes – an odyssey, a turning-point trauma, a crucial misunderstanding resolved in an epiphany – serves to conventionalise Audrey’s life (and it’s hard to see how Morley is critiquing these conventions). The film’s score, by Carly Paradis, contains unusual sounds but it’s used conventionally, as mood music.
Audrey keeps seeing individuals encountered during the journey north as significant people from her past: a woman taking a senior citizens’ yoga class in a church vestry is her grammar school headmistress; another elderly woman in a suburban house, where Sandra seeks directions, is a less fondly remembered teacher, ‘Miss Hunter’, and Audrey starts yelling at her. This episode is untypical in that the unfortunate woman is scared and tells Audrey and Sandra to get lost. For the most part, Audrey’s repeated loss of temper and control, for all the noise she makes, takes place in a vacuum. A choir practice is going on in the church at the same time as the yoga class; Audrey marches straight through the singers, with Sandra in tow. The choir, rather than reacting, forms the first in a series of similar tableaux – the yoga women, an historical re-enactment group, Morris dancers whose performance Audrey interrupts. At least in the last instance, when the men let her join in, there’s some movement, even if Audrey’s own idiosyncratic dance doesn’t quite fit with the Morris choreography. The protagonist herself reacts fully – when, for example, after a spat with Sandra, she hitches a lift with a driver who tries to grope her. But we rarely get a sense of how disruptive and alarming Audrey’s behaviour can be; even when she loses it and trashes the entrance lobby of a hotel where she and Sandra stay, the receptionist calls the police as if it’s just part of a day’s work. It can’t be that Carol Morley means the prevailing under-reaction to suggest that the world keeps failing to notice Audrey: long-suffering Sandra keeps shushing, and apologising for, her – unnecessarily, since no one bar ‘Miss Hunter’ seems bothered.
Monica Dolan, a super actress, would need to be a superhuman one to satisfy in this role. Dolan does witty, affecting things here but seems always to be giving-a-performance and – wearing Audrey’s colour un-coordinated outfits – in unfamiliar costume. Kelly Macdonald is a good actress, too, but Morley has set her a thankless as well as an impossible task. The invented character of Sandra is given no context or opportunity to reveal more about herself. When Audrey, paranoid-quixotic and tilting at windmills, mentions that Sandra’s surname is Panza, we get the idea – and that Sandra is hardly more than that: as a car driver, she literally supplies a vehicle for the story, merely gets the show on the road. Some of the acting in smaller parts is pretty ropy. This hardly matters when a character comes and goes within seconds; it’s a bigger problem with, say, a young male hitchhiker to whom Sandra gives a lift and who stays around for several minutes. The one pleasant surprise in the cast is Gina McKee. With not very much screen time, she conveys Dorothy’s persisting affection for, and exasperation with, her unruly sister: by creating a character, McKee also gives Monica Dolan something to engage with.
The Audrey-Dorothy exchanges convince you these are people with a past together that neither can shed; so much more of Carol Morley’s film feels awkwardly artificial. She punctuates the narrative with shots of Audrey Amiss’s actual art work, assorted jottings and memorabilia, which also appear as the closing credits get underway. These images are tantalising rather than complementary to the drama. I wanted Typist Artist Pirate King to work. I’m really sorry that it doesn’t.
8 November 2023
