Re: Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC
Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2016 3:15 am
My catch-up impressions:
Under the Age - Formally, this is a throwback to the format of the Half Hour Stories, but in terms of Clarke's confidence, and the material's strength, it's in a different class entirely. It's a chamber piece that's dominated by a weird, abrasive mix of menace and jocularity, with queer bartender Susie dominating his tiny domain in a manner that's both sadistic and oddly defensive. He's a million miles away from any contemporary queer stereotype I can recall, and Paul Angelis delivers one hell of a performance in the role. The short play builds to a shocking, but hardly unexpected, conclusion that makes the character seethingly complicated.
Horace - We're solidly in a phase where just about every film seems like a great leap forward for Clarke in terms of confidence and complexity, and this peculiar character study is expansive, troubling and brilliantly observed. As is frequently the case with his 70s films, there's a pervasive note of sadness that society is ill-equipped to deal with certain kinds of people, which is a decisive reversal of the normal orientation of films about outsiders.
The Love Girl and the Innocent - This Solzhenitsyn adaptation is by several measures Clarke's most ambitious film to date, with a sprawling cast and an alien setting. It's fascinating to watch him deal with this new challenge, but I found it the first film where the paucity of means really harmed the film, and the script was far less attuned to nuances of character than the domestic collaborations he'd been working on. Thus I found it much less engaging than the surrounding films despite some powerful sequences.
Penda's Fen - I'd seen this a long time ago, but I'd forgotten just how delightfully strange it was. Clarke tackles Rudkin's mystic whimsy in a burly, matter-of-fact way, and somehow it works brilliantly alongside the more characteristic Clarkean elements (the deconstruction of a masculine institution; sensitive and nuanced queer characters; yet another bunch of sympathetic and complex Christians).
A Follower for Emily - For all that this looks like a typical, earnestly well-meaning BBC play, the deeper you look the more extraordinary it becomes. Clarke's gaze is continually distracted by everything that's going on around our geriatric lovebirds, and the expected happy ending is flatly refused without being overtly undercut.
Diane - I'd actually seen this long, long ago, but I must have blocked out just how devastating this film was. Maybe as a coping mechanism. Put as bluntly as possible, this is one of the finest British films ever made.
(Non-explicit spoilers follow.) The structure is sheer, brutal genius. The film is divided right down the middle into a mismatched pair of standard British dramas about a young girl dealing with the kinds of things young girls in standard British dramas deal with: family strife, school, work, boyfriends. The girl in each half is Diane, but despite a shared spark of playful sarcasm, she's not quite the same character in them. Her character also doesn't quite conform to the standard expectations of standard British dramas about young girls, and some of her behaviour in both the younger and older sections surprises us: a family fight over a misplaced magazine has a striking air of undermotivated acrimony; sincere romantic overtures are met with a weird bitterness. The reasons for this behaviour are buried in the handful of scenes that divide the two halves and which colour every other second of the film in the most astonishing fashion.
The effect is most striking in the second half. My wife wandered in and watched most of this section of the film and had absolutely no idea why I was responding with shudders of dread or suppressed yelps to what appeared to be entirely innocuous exchanges, and had no idea why I found the film so harrowing.
Janine Duvitski has been in everything over the years, and is probably best remembered for Abigail's Party, where she gives a perfectly calibrated comic performance for the material, but her work here is stunning, and in most scenes she's playing two different levels of the character at once.
Under the Age - Formally, this is a throwback to the format of the Half Hour Stories, but in terms of Clarke's confidence, and the material's strength, it's in a different class entirely. It's a chamber piece that's dominated by a weird, abrasive mix of menace and jocularity, with queer bartender Susie dominating his tiny domain in a manner that's both sadistic and oddly defensive. He's a million miles away from any contemporary queer stereotype I can recall, and Paul Angelis delivers one hell of a performance in the role. The short play builds to a shocking, but hardly unexpected, conclusion that makes the character seethingly complicated.
Spoiler
I read the ending quite differently from the writer of the book essay, as I didn't see Susie's last words as being motivated by envy. For me, they revealed that he was acting throughout out of fear, and fully expected that the inevitable violence at the end of the evening would be directed at him. That he willingly offers up the girls as 'sacrificial victims' remains a catastrophic failure of empathy, but it's a more understandable one. It means that his provocative, flirtatious behaviour throughout the encounter would actually have been intended as a kind of intimidation (or, possibly, as an attempt to 'turn' the thug that seemed to be more pliable). The reading offered in the essay assumes that Susie has a desire to be raped, which I find extremely problematic, and not really supported by what else we see of his character.
The Love Girl and the Innocent - This Solzhenitsyn adaptation is by several measures Clarke's most ambitious film to date, with a sprawling cast and an alien setting. It's fascinating to watch him deal with this new challenge, but I found it the first film where the paucity of means really harmed the film, and the script was far less attuned to nuances of character than the domestic collaborations he'd been working on. Thus I found it much less engaging than the surrounding films despite some powerful sequences.
Penda's Fen - I'd seen this a long time ago, but I'd forgotten just how delightfully strange it was. Clarke tackles Rudkin's mystic whimsy in a burly, matter-of-fact way, and somehow it works brilliantly alongside the more characteristic Clarkean elements (the deconstruction of a masculine institution; sensitive and nuanced queer characters; yet another bunch of sympathetic and complex Christians).
A Follower for Emily - For all that this looks like a typical, earnestly well-meaning BBC play, the deeper you look the more extraordinary it becomes. Clarke's gaze is continually distracted by everything that's going on around our geriatric lovebirds, and the expected happy ending is flatly refused without being overtly undercut.
Spoiler
Rather than there being any decisive break, the couple simply start immediately growing apart the moment after they're at their closest - or, more cruelly, the moment Harry finally gets to screw Emily.
(Non-explicit spoilers follow.) The structure is sheer, brutal genius. The film is divided right down the middle into a mismatched pair of standard British dramas about a young girl dealing with the kinds of things young girls in standard British dramas deal with: family strife, school, work, boyfriends. The girl in each half is Diane, but despite a shared spark of playful sarcasm, she's not quite the same character in them. Her character also doesn't quite conform to the standard expectations of standard British dramas about young girls, and some of her behaviour in both the younger and older sections surprises us: a family fight over a misplaced magazine has a striking air of undermotivated acrimony; sincere romantic overtures are met with a weird bitterness. The reasons for this behaviour are buried in the handful of scenes that divide the two halves and which colour every other second of the film in the most astonishing fashion.
The effect is most striking in the second half. My wife wandered in and watched most of this section of the film and had absolutely no idea why I was responding with shudders of dread or suppressed yelps to what appeared to be entirely innocuous exchanges, and had no idea why I found the film so harrowing.
Spoiler
The brilliance of this structure is how it forces us into kind of the same headspace as Diane: denying the events of the central scenes and acting as if everything is normal. Diane's only triumph is to be a survivor, but that's enough, and I found her acknowledgement of this in her final speech to her father a moment of amazing heroism on her part - as is, I hope, her disappearance at the end of the film.
