Tag: British drama

Nocturnal

Posted on by Paul Risker

Happiness doesn’t appear to belong in the coastal town of director Nathalie Biancheri’s British début feature Nocturnal, originally released in 2019 and playing the 2021 edition of the ArteKino Festival. Set in Yorkshire, Painter and decorator Pete (Cosmo Jarvis) scrapes by, an isolated figure outside of his doomed relationship with Suzanne (Amy Griffiths) and casual hook-ups. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old track athlete Laurie (Lauren Coe), who has moved from Dublin struggles to fit in. Neither Pete nor Laurie have any power or influence, so it’s unsurprising that their paths should cross. Their combined status is akin to the conventional sombre tones of marginalised figures, lending the story a distinct British air.

The noticeable age gap and the secrecy of their friendship stirs in the audience concern about the perceptions of others, and whether this is an innocent friendship that’s doomed, or will it take on a darker incarnation. These fears are not dissuaded when Laurie begins to show her romantic interest in Pete.

Difficult to find a level of comfort, Nocturnal is a film tailored to appreciation instead of entertainment. Biancheri, like other British directors, including Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, understands that it’s not the directors place to entertain their audience, but to provoke their interest. She achieves this in phases – first the fear of where their relationship could lead, before a revelatory moment firmly decides the story’s intent.

Biancheri walks into the jaws of difficult human moments. Nocturnal finds itself in the shadows of the struggle of the human experience. The intention isn’t to be a social critique of the fallout from the relationship between a young impressionable girl and older man. Instead, the director is interested in hidden motivations that conflict with how her audience will interpret a situation. It’s a reflection of how we misinterpret in everyday life, and it’s an echo of the fear for vulnerable young people and women.

The revelation that reveals an unexpected connection between the pair feels awkward. We’re left to consider whether this is a genuine development in their relationship, or is it a manufactured one? Biancheri risks losing her audience, but we should consider whether Pete can play the role he’s meant to play, when he has never been asked to? How should Pete behave when Laurie, a stranger, is unaware of the connection they share?

While Laurie struggles with relocating, Pete has never been able to escape the town he swore he’d one day leave. The story becomes about entrapment – Laurie’s desire to sexually explore herself, to grow up, while her mother comes to find herself reminded of a reckless moment. The reason Pete might struggle to commit to his girlfriend is because the town is not where he wants to put down roots. He’s someone that has always been looking off into the distance.

The understated cinematography and the coastal setting complements the banal lives of the characters. The anxiety of being the adolescent outsider is a common and unpleasant experience many of Biancheri’s audience will have experienced. It’s easy for us to identify or sympathise with the young protagonist, who is ridiculed and looked down upon by her peers. She puts on a tough front, but she wants to be accepted. She echoes the nightmarish anxiety of wanting to grow up, to hit those milestones, that among her peer group are a form of competition, boosting or deflating one’s pride.

The adults themselves seem lost in the fringes of an existential crisis. They go through the motions, unaware of the potential meaninglessness of life. Biancheri’s characters work dead-end jobs, relationships are broken and unfulfilled, and they indulge in quickies out the back of work. It’s not a view that gives hope to adolescents that adulthood brings with it a brighter future. Nocturnal however, is neither optimistic nor cynical, it’s about the mixed tones of the human experience, indifferent to popular adjectives.

Watch Nocturnal online for free during the entire month of December only with ArteKino.

Wilderness

Posted on by Paul Risker

Cinema and the love story are no strangers to one another – old acquaintances by now, many lovers have stared long and hard into one another’s eyes, shared a first kiss, first dance, and had a lust filled or romantic tryst. This has led to either a happily ever after, or many a broken heart.

In director Justin John Doherty and writer Neil Fox’s British drama Wilderness, it’s the turn of touring jazz musician John (James Barnes) and Alice (Katharine Davenport). When they meet after a gig, their one night-stand develops into a full-blown love affair. The pair take a romantic getaway to Cornwall, and after spending an evening with John’s former touring mate Charlie (Sebastian Badarau) and his wife Frances (Bean Downes), their bliss is rocked when their vulnerabilities and flaws are exposed.

It’s necessary to acknowledge that Wilderness comes out of the same creative stable that produced Mark Jenkin’s Bait (2019). Associations are like double-edged blades, and as much as we may try, we cannot help but consider the two films together. Completed two years before the release of Bait, that rare near-perfect masterpiece we crave, always searching for the next one, Wilderness is not that film. With that said, it’s a captivating work that along with Bait, echoes those moments in cinema of stylistic explosions as seen with Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave.

Wilderness like Bait has that same visual out of film vibe, a jarring feeling that goes beyond what Jean-Luc Godard did in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), and differing from the extremes of British social realism. It’s a short sharp gasp of what cinema can be, escaping the neat and tidy aesthetic that we so often see, to offer something more expressive.

Scripted and shot with a deliberate intent, it’s unlikely Wilderness is as improvised as it is liable to feel. To liken it to music, which is fitting given the jazz musician and the soundtrack. it’s not as extreme as “free blowing”, where the musician improvises without restraint. The rhythm of the dialogue and performances looks, feels and sounds different, but it’s the strong expressive voice that mid-flow can mistakenly feel like the filmmakers are improvising with the filmic language.

The inflections on the words, their mannerisms have the feel of actors learning their lines, scrutinising their meaning and how best to play the scene. It has the rawness of stage performance, a deliberateness, that the camera frame, the edit and the music creates a visceral hybrid of the sense of feeling provoked by the aesthetics of the screen and the stage.

The overall execution conveys the feeling that John and Alice are real people talking to one another, interrogating their thoughts and feelings. This is not authentic realism, it’s an expression of it within the scope of the cinematic language. The visual playfulness contrasts to the austere style of British social realist films, with words not always in synch with the action onscreen. We watch their tryst as we hear phrases that are likely from a post-coital conversation. The editing disrupts a natural chronological rhythm, the camera mimicking a person’s gaze and concentration gone astray.

If we are to find its roots, we should look to the Nouvelle Vague, that tried to convey realism through the art house aesthetic, as well as through plainer dramas such as François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), and the more stylised À bout de souffle. It’s here that Wilderness nestles itself somewhere in the in-between, as it attempts to find the border between reality and the realism of drama, always with an artistic sensibility.

The core moment of the drama is when John and Alice interrogate their besotted feelings for one another. They can only feel this impulsive attraction, but they cannot understand it. Wilderness is about how we try to find certainty, and specifically our habitual desire to want to hold on to a moment. This invariably creates anxiety, and these lovers don’t want to believe this intoxicated feeling will end up as only an emotional flash-point in their lives.

Together they experience the imperfections of love, a mix of angry words, as much as it is loving gestures. Neither can know what the future will hold, and the most significant observation is how falling in love is not only an act of exposing yourself to your lover, but how it’s a confrontation with your own vulnerabilities and flaws. Maybe Alice is right when she tells John, “Be an adult and live in your confusion.” It’s okay to allow ourselves to momentarily live in the future, but the confusion and uncertainty of our present is our home. The words “the end” pre-credits, is less of a statement and more a silent question, a fitting end to a captivating critique of the mysteries of love and lust.

Wilderness is available to stream on various platforms such as Amazon Prime, Google Play and YouTube.

Ray & Liz

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

What about this, a piece of British kitchen sink that continues the spirit of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies, without leaning on the crutch of miserablism or heavy-handed political metaphor. Ray & Liz does go to some difficult, dark places, but with a sense of humour, a generous spirit, and a dedication to recapturing the memories of youth. This is photographer Richard Billingham’s reminiscence of childhood in the Black Country, in the West Midlands. Two notable, heartrending stories tied together by present day Ray, who sits around his bedroom drinking himself to death while a neighbour provides him with homebrews. He thinks back to his ’80s home life with his wife Liz, raising kids while sinking into poverty.

But the first story barely features Ray and Liz at all. It’s mostly a two-hander between the amazing British character actor Tony Way as Ray’s simple but sweet brother, charged with looking after the kids, and Sam Gittins as a nihilistic punk who has other ideas. It’s a dynamic straight out of the great Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1984), Gittins channelling one of Gary Oldman’s breakthrough performances.

As played by Ella Smith, Liz is a sensational character, a force of nature who dominates every scene she’s in and whose presence hangs over the film when she’s offscreen. With a flick of the wrist or a well-timed wince, everything that’s going on inside her head comes across, Billingham’s tight photography capturing the air sucking out of a room. Often when a photographer turns to movies, the results can feel somewhat airless, but the style of Billingham’s work is part sitcom, part art-house, all coming together into a complete vision.

The result is the feeling of being told stories second-hand. It’s when you’re visiting an old family member and they tell you about what their cousin used to up to. It’s when you dig through the loft and find a shoebox full of old toys. Because when someone tells you about their past, the rarely contextualise it in a political era. They are far more likely to tell you about specific faces, places, and things. And that’s what Gillingham does. Bad art adorns the walls of this flat. Liz clearly loves pictures of animals, they’re all over her mugs, they’re the jigsaw puzzles she struggles with. This art provides a counterpoint to the events on screen, with effective cuts from a nosebleed to a painting of a caveman poking his own nose. It’s as though the room is speaking to the characters.

By packing so much detail into these memories, Ray & Liz manages to avoid the cliches of the genre. There are no clips of Thatcher on television or mention of the mines closing to set the scene. We don’t need it. Garish ’70s carpets, a cooker black with dust, even a squashed kitchen roll instead tell the viewer the entire socio-economic situation of the characters. In the final third of the film, the characters do come into more direct contact with the system, but it’s not trying to raise eyebrows or stir tweets in the way that recent Ken Loach tends to. It’s Billingham’s story, and the realities of that aren’t turned into melodrama or sermon. And it feels all the more like a remarkable depiction of Britain for it.

Ray & Liz showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, when this piece was originally written. On UK cinemas on March 8th. On VoD on Monday, July 8th.

The Levelling

Posted on by victorfraga

Beware: The Levelling is not comfortable viewing. Female British director Hope Dickson Leach shows a Great Britain that some people only became acquainted with after the EU referendum last year. Life in Britain can be hard, and people in the rural areas are often left on their own.

The movie is a profound family drama set in Somerset 2014 after the disastrous floods. Clover Catto (the excellent Ellie Kendrick) returns to the farm where she grew up after her brother died, in a possible suicide. She is not at all happy to come back home and she needs to get in touch again with her father Aubrey.

In terms of narrative and rhythm, the film is slow. The first dialogue is a little redundant; instead Leach could have jumped to the scene in which Clover arrives in the farm. That is the crucial point to the film and a microcosm of it too. The opening scene must grab the audience immediately. But once you survived the initial heavy atmosphere, you will be led to the territory The Levelling is. Don’t forget: it gets very muddy!

Grief sets tone of the film. No wonder a party turns into a funeral. The actors move into very dark places and there is no space for understanding. In real life, farmers are still waiting for the insurance to cover the losses caused by the floods. At least 1,135 homes were flooded in January 2014. Clover is trying to reconnect with her past and her parents, but the lack of dialogue is an issue. There is denial, silence and plenty of other difficulties in confronting emotional problems. It is devastating. The Levelling captures a real modern-day feeling that prevails in the region.

Compare, for example, what we are used to see on the tellie in shows such as ‘Grand Designs‘, with Kevin McCloud at Channel 4. From that point of view, moving to the countryside is a luxury, a ticket to a glamorous lifestyle. But a single look at Ellie can transform your magic dream into a nightmare: muddy wellies, stinky animals and no make-up (she still looks pretty, though).

In her debut, Leach looks at the British class system from a brand new angle. She is not talking about the working class that Ken Loach usually depicts. And she doesn’t gaze at the aristocracy either, something that the British period films do all the time. The Levelling investigates the middle class.

Don’t miss The Levelling, out in cinemas nationwide this weekend.