Tag: Carol Morley

Typist Artist Pirate King

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

In these days of US-style promotion, branding and media, it’s easy to think of artists as high profile, rich and successful. While some are, that’s not what an artist is: an artist is, quite simply, someone who makes art. (If they’re a good artist, they make good art. Whatever that is.) The subject of Morley’s new road movie is the artist Audrey Amiss (1933-2013) who, although she exhibited her work a number of times during her lifetime, received scarcely any recognition in that period. She suffered from mental health issues and was in and out of mental hospitals throughout her life.

Audrey (Monica Dolan) is regularly visited in her London flat by psychiatric nurse Sandra (Kelly Macdonald). One day, she asks Sandra to drive her to an exhibition which has an open call for artists, as she’s never exhibited and feels the time has come. Sandra first turns her down, but on a later date after some consideration agrees – although she’s somewhat horrified en route when Audrey’s “local” turns out to mean “Sunderland”, the best part of 300 miles North.

Thus, the pair yet out in Sandra’s bright yellow car Sunshine band undergo a series of encounters with people from Audrey’s past. In reality, they aren’t the people from Audrey’s past, but she mistakes them as such in her mind. Just as she isn’t always convinced Sandra is really Sandra or even that she herself wasn’t taken over by an imposter at an early age (following a specific traumatic experience, which the narrative explores in the final reel towards the end of Audrey and Sandra’s journey).

There are many joys to be experienced on the way. A wise vicar (Gary Bates) breaks into a church lavatory after Audrey accidentally locks herself in and, unlike numerous media presentations of clergy, manages to say and do just the right things to help her. A hitchhiker (Issam Al Gussein), who turns out to be another artist, gets thrown out of the car after addressing Audrey as a “freak”. A van driver (Neal Barry), who gives Audrey a lift after a row with Sandra, seems a pleasant chap until he starts trying to take sexual advantage of her (a rare moment when this largely brave and original film lapses into cliché). Eventually, she visits unannounced her Sunderland-based sister (Gina McKee) who she’s not contacted for six years.

Dolan is fantastic as the woman who exhibits both a personality disorder and a talent for expressing herself visually; her performance is ably complemented by short bursts of little sequences showing three or four of Audrey’s works in rapid succession throughout. The role is a gift for an actor, not only because of the wide palette of motion and behaviour undergone by Audrey in the course of the film, but also because she has to interact with characters she believes to be a person from her past when in fact they are someone else she has never met.

Macdonald provides an anchor to Dolan’s out of control persona, while McKee, although she doesn’t appear until late in the story, proves a huge presence in the final reel, a good and generous sister.

There’s a fascinating religious (Christian) subtext to all this, too. Audrey wears a cross and, however messed up her life might be, appears to have a deep-seated faith in God as expressed in the Christian tradition. As well as the aforementioned episode in a rural church building (the name St. Christina The Astonishing can be seen on a notice board inside the premises), there are comforting religious words, there is one in-car conversation about Jesus, there are references to hymns and hymn singing which, as any Christian person will tell you, can carry and communicate great nuggets of spiritual truth, often in a clear and concise, albeit almost subliminal way. Not that the film is proselytizing, or anything like that: far from it.

Morley is far from your typical British director; she tends not to repeat herself, except for the fact that her films are consistently provocative. This new film is well up to par. As a bonus, it has a scene with Morris dancers.

Typist Artist Pirate King premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally. Its UK premiere takes place at the 31st Raindance Film Festival. In cinemas on Friday, October 27th. On Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, December 8th.

Out Of Blue

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Morley’s latest film is both infuriating and enthralling in equal measure. Infuriating because its convoluted plot, firing off in several directions one after another, is often nigh on impossible to follow. Enthralling because while you never quite know where you are, it periodically throws at you utterly compelling little visual clues and sequences of images as teasers to suggest narrative or other possibilities.

Some viewers are going to hate this film and wonder why they wasted their money to see it. Others like myself, while not showering the film with unqualified praise, are going to want to revisit it several times and get more out of it each time they return. If you’ve got the patience and are prepared to dig on a first viewing and return later to dig some more, there’s a lot waiting to be unearthed here.

After a brief introductory sequence in which astronomer Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) talks to a small audience outside an observatory about the stars and our place in the universe, she becomes the subject of a homicide case. But who pulled the trigger and blew her face off?

Finding herself in charge of the investigation, Police Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) examines the crime scene. Rainfall has interfered with it through the opened telescope slit in the domed roof. She notes such objects as a gun, a sock, a high heeled shoe and a jar of skin cream. She is approached by and surprisingly quickly falls in with TV news reporter Stella Honey (Devyn Tyler) who appears at unexpected moments and disappears equally unexpectedly.

The two immediate murder suspects are Jennifer’s boss Dr. Ian Strammi (Toby Jones) – it was his gun and he covered up the telescope but didn’t close the roof – and her boyfriend Duncan Reynolds (Jonathan Majors) – it was his sock. Reynolds’ alibi was that he rushed home after lovemaking to work on an all-consuming academic theory, Strammi’s that he spent all night with a female student discussing Schrödinger’s Cat. Hoolihan’s boss Lieutentant Janey McBride (Yolanda Ross) and colleague Tony Silvero (Aaron Tveit) have different ideas, including the latter’s belief that the perpetrator is the .38 Calibre Killer who hasn’t killed since the 1980s.

Something doesn’t feel quite right to Hoolihan, though, so she turns her attention outwards to the victim’s family – war hero father Colonel Tom (James Caan), mother Miriam (Jacki Weaver) and their twin sons.

The plot may or may not be clearer in Martin Amis’ novel Night Train from which Morley’s script is adapted, although she’s apparently removed and added quite a lot of material. The New Orleans setting allows for a commendably interracial cast and a clutch of striking performances. Chief among these is Clarkson’s detective, trying to just get on and do her job even as elements from the case on which she’s working resonate with half-remembered memory fragments from her own past. Or perhaps they’re prophetic images from her future.

Morley tantalisingly baffles and dazzles us with repeating images: a red scarf blowing in the wind of an electric fan, blue necklace baubles dropping onto and bouncing on a floor. The piece ends as it begins with images of the stars in the sky above the city.

All this proceeds in a kaleidoscopic manner focusing on a character here and a bunch of images there until a point towards the end where one of the images furnishes a key clue as to what all this is about and the solution is abruptly revealed in a curt couple of lines of dialogue that could have been thrown in at any earlier point in the proceedings.

As far as Morley’s concerned, the plot doesn’t seem to be what really matters. Her interest lies elsewhere – trauma, memory, repression. Our past affecting our present. Some intensely personal events have influenced Morley’s directing: her father committed suicide when she was eleven and according to the press blurb there were characters and situations in Amis’ novel that she immediately recognised as from her past. If the film doesn’t work so well as a straightforward genre exercise, those viewers with the patience to let it speak to them on its own terms over multiple viewings will find it rich in meaning indeed.

Out Of Blue is out in the UK on Friday, March 29th. Before then, it screens in the Glasgow Film Festival on Wednesday and Thursday, February 27th and 28th. On VoD (BFI Player and other platforms) on Monday, October 21st.