I found this film really frustrating to write about! I think it generally succeeds as a film in its own right, yet there are so many nuances that I think are essential to the piece that get muted. And there are a few changes and amendments that work for the narrative of the film, but sort of damage the essence of the characters and their 'awakenings'. I'm not entirely sure that people are going to come away from this thinking that J.G. Ballard was a subversive writer for the ages, more just a curio of the 1970s, which suggests to me that the film missed its targets (or maybe it hit them, in terms of sucking out the poison before it spreads further!)
But maybe its because I think the wild abandonment needs to be seen with more of an icy-cool detachment than spaced out winking abstraction. There definitely is humour in all of Ballard's work but its humour that needs to be played entirely, frighteningly deadpan. This film revels in the wacky antics humour a bit too much, to an almost undermining extent. And the spiral into orgiastic anarchy feels a bit too abstractly done when we really need a clinical eye brought to bear. We need a film on a slightly larger scale where we see more of the logistics of keeping the workaday pretence up whilst simultaneously conducting petty feuds over which level of society you are on, and the solidarity between floors.
On the changes, I think they all take the story into interesting directions but they also mean that the film really should follow through on the changes it implements to follow up those amendments. Its difficult to believe that the film can end up psychologically in the same place that the book does after some of the amendments, yet it does.
Perhaps the key change for me is Laing being insulted by his co-worker Munrow, sending him for a brain scan and falsely giving Munrow 'bad news' about the findings, which causes Munrow to commit suicide by throwing himself out of the building. In the book the person who commits suicide (or do they?) is an otherwise anonymous jewellery merchant. While it is still a horrible incident there is a detachment there that is lost by making Laing culpable in some way for the death. Its not the building that has done it, the haves and have nots rubbing together until somebody is bumped over the edge, but a petty jealousy that was festering with or without the boiling pot architecture. It also turns Laing into a much more passive character in the second half, hiding in his apartment and painting the walls to cover his guilt and start afresh.
This is interesting in the sense that it turns Laing more into a character from Ballard's agoraphobic works such as his great short story over a decade later The Enormous Space (later filmed as Home), and that itself emphasises the very British idea of an Englishman's home being his castle and an idealised (and incredibly impractical!) idea of being able to pull up the drawbridge into blissful self sufficiency. That is a powerful enough idea that it can even slough off any notions of society and societal responsibility itself as being an unnecessary encumberance in the grander scheme of things. (Its also more generally in the tradition of what happens if everyone collectively decides to not follow the rules anymore, as in the other short story involving holidaymakers at a Mediterranean beach resort just deciding not to go home at the end of their package holiday, and instead starting a revolution from their beach loungers!)
Yet Laing in the novel is more active at that point rather than mired in guilt. In the novel he has two women to take care of in the form of his sister (who is dead in the film) and the Pauline Kael style older film critic Eleanor (who merge together while he can only watch from afar). He's more concerned about fighting for his own position on the floor, taking part in raids and holding the lifts for his tribe, whilst in the film itself he is more aloof and isolated. Though without specific attachments this makes Laing a part of the other women's stories in a more concrete (and again implicated) way in the film.
I actually don't have too many problems with the dropping of the sister and Eleanor from the film to simplify things a bit, as the other women are still there (I can also cope with the dropping of Royal's big metaphorical vision of the birds wheeling around the ventilation shafts, as there are a couple of allusions to this with seagull cries on the soundtrack). I was glad that the eventual 'band of sisters' aspect was kept (a very 1970s concept reminiscent of The Beguiled and 3 Women) yet there are still a few problems here with the nuances which seem to move away from the three main characters of Laing, Wilder and Royal (their roles are really another id, ego and superego metaphor) having their own revelations about the female sex, and more towards women having to take over from ineffectual men. The film is more about getting rid of the men for the Thatcherite future where women can exist in splendid isolation and the white wine flows as freely as the power, while the book is about the women knowing that they need a male 'hunter and gatherer' even in this new world.
Royal as the architect is the 'creator' but unable to control what his creation is used for when 'real life' gets involved. The sex scene with Royal and his wife while her companion looks on (itself like The Handmaid's Tale) in the book is more about Royal trying to prove himself still to be the dominant male of the pack, yet his job is long over. Wilder is the unstable young buck (who in the book spends most of the last third naked except for warpaint) but he oversteps his boundaries with rape and murder and has to be disposed of - willingly approaching the women to die in the book, murdered in the film. Laing is the middle ground, the 'best amenity in the building' in one of the film's great lines. He has to be present to do the dirty work, yet know his place in the world and be happy with his lot, and in that sense he is the most successful of anyone in his new position. That finale for Laing is still there in the film, but slightly muted.
I think perhaps the best example of my issues with the film can be described in the fate of one of the characters (not just Wilder). If none of the following issues would bother you then I think you'll be fine with this adaptation:
SpoilerShow
Royal gets shot by Wilder and in the film his body is carried down to the building's indoor swimming pool by Laing, who takes him into the pool (surrounded by the bodies of the other men) and then lays him to rest in the deep end, watching as Royal disappears underneath the murky water. That's a beautiful image (and even works to strengthen that metaphor of Royal's 'superego' getting submurged back under the surface of consciousness by Laing's 'ego'!), and it works as a powerful image for this film. Yet I think it kind of misses the power of Royal's end in the book, where Laing finds him still dying, not already dead. Laing then escorts Royal to the swimming pool to die and looks on as Royal himself gets into the, drained, pool and painfully begins dragging himself to the deep end where all the bodies have been dumped. The difference here might seem slight enough to seem nitpicking (its why I think in some ways the film succeeds in its adaptation by becoming something else), but this is the kind of story where those tiny details are where all the emotional resonance has been hiding.
Plus one of Ballard's big visual metaphors running through all of his work (even Empire of the Sun) is the use of drained swimming pools as a metaphor for a kind of spiritual emptiness and decayed (or at least dehydrated!) decadence. (Its also why I feel Robert Altman's 3 Women is very Ballardian in some ways!) The womb-like curve of bland concrete walls surrounding a figure is an oppressive metaphor too, and as key a visual idea as the car park is in Ballard's work. To then have the swimming pool remain full in the final scene seems kind of un-Ballardian!
Plus one of Ballard's big visual metaphors running through all of his work (even Empire of the Sun) is the use of drained swimming pools as a metaphor for a kind of spiritual emptiness and decayed (or at least dehydrated!) decadence. (Its also why I feel Robert Altman's 3 Women is very Ballardian in some ways!) The womb-like curve of bland concrete walls surrounding a figure is an oppressive metaphor too, and as key a visual idea as the car park is in Ballard's work. To then have the swimming pool remain full in the final scene seems kind of un-Ballardian!
In a way its difficult to work out what the film intends to say with this adaptation. Its period-futurism both harkens back to an earlier age of three day weeks and binmen strikes (the anarchy that means people welcome Thatcher with open arms for some kind of stability and assurance of continued prosperity), and sort of safely preserves it in aspic too. Any of the darker messages of the film are smothered beneath period set dressing, music video editing and emphatic score (it made me think that Cronenberg's Crash did the best thing by updating its adaptation to an undefined 'present day' setting, the Canadian setting already adding a kind of off-key vibe to the whole environment!). I hate to say it but I think the oppressively overemphatic, underlining score is perhaps the worst aspect here. The Portishead cover of Abba's SOS underscoring the rape of Charlotte/Laing feeling raw emotion for the first time is the one piece that kind of works, but its literalism is something that is dogging the rest of the score too, adding a layer of goofy comedy to what should be empty gestures hanging in the air. That underscore feels like it keeps telling the audience again and again that it is not only safe to laugh, but they should be laughing at the violent antics (except for the SOS moment, when we are admonished and told in no uncertain terms that things have now gone too far!), and so softens the blow too much.
In the end this feels like a film thats made by people who at heart know that all the characters are completely insane and are enjoying letting loose for a while by adapting this weird book, assured (in the painfully too obvious Thatcher speech at the end) that this is a prescient harbinger of a horrific future thats already safely in the past. While the book is written in a manner to suggest that reciprocal insanity is perhaps the only sensible reaction to an insane and dehumanisingly boxed in world, whatever the era. You have to embrace and push on through the 'illness' until the fever breaks. Its perhaps why Ballard kept revisiting its themes of social heirarchies and gated communities solipsistically breeding within a limited gene pool and going to seed in glorious, self-sustaining seclusion in Super-Cannes and Millennium People. Even his final novel, Kingdom Come. (I still think Millennium People is the modern century's version of Passport to Pimlico!). This 1970s set film would work if it were just one part of that kind of trilogy moving into the future, but as a period piece there's nothing to do but smirk at how silly people were back then, if only in the way they dressed! It would date the film quickly, but the true subversive final speech in that last scene would be better coming from Theresa May or, perhaps more pointedly, from Christine Lagarde!