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Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
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The idea of a ‘secret’ London is a seductive one. Who knows what lurks behind dilapidated Victorian facades, at the end of sinister winding alleyways or tucked away in church crypts? You hear tales of abandoned tube stations, nuclear bunkers under roundsabouts, warrens of government tunnels in Whitehall; another London, off limits and subterranean. Our guide to this mysterious world was Matt Brown, editor of The Londonist, the single most useful website for anyone wanting to know what’s going on in London.
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| 55 Broadway |
Appropriately given the subject matter, the talk was in a secret location: the 10th floor of the Grade I listed headquarters of the London Underground, 55 Broadway. Built in 1929 and designed by architect Charles Holden it sits directly on top of St James Park underground station. There’s an aura of importance to the building, the art deco detailing brings to mind streamlined and retro aerodynamic design, the dawning of the age of mechanised speed. The lobby is filled with awards won by London Underground and there’s a fantastic ticking machine wired into the tube network showing the frequency of the trains rumbling below us. Up on the tenth floor we’re allowed out onto the roof gardens and even though it’s a drizzly winter night the view is pretty stunning. The landmarks of London are laid out like a postcard in front of us: the London Eye, Westminster Cathedral, the BT Tower, St Paul’s Cathedral and their newest sibling, the brightly lit Shard.
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| The new concourse at Kings Cross. |
I was initially a little apprehensive that this talk would essentially be a long list of trivia, a mound of interesting yet disconnected facts. Very quickly I realised this wasn’t going to be the case; Matt’s perspective on the city is that of London as process. This philosophy doesn’t treat the past as simply something to be memorised in a vacuum, but as the fuel that powers and shapes our modern city. He began with a great example of this, explaining how the curve of the new concourse at King’s Cross Station was directly influenced by glacial movements during the last ice age. To summarise; the curve of the concourse derives from the curve of the Great Northern Hotel (in the top right of the image); the curve of the hotel followed the path of Pancras Road; Pancras Road was built to follow the now buried River Fleet and the River Fleet’s course was influenced by glacial movements 10,000 years ago. At this point we should note that the brand new concourse resembles… a glacier!
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| Tranquil. |
During this section of the talk Matt shows us an image of a pastoral St Pancras Old Church. Absolutely nothing about this image screams ‘London’. We see open fields, clear skies, wild woodland – there are men lazily paddling their feet in the River Fleet. Without context you might expect it to be a representation of some sleepy countryside hamlet. But it’s not. I cycle through this pastoral landscape on my way to gigs in Camden. The church is still there, marooned like a galleon frozen in ice, but the city has swallowed up the tranquillity around it. Red bricked tower blocks have replaced the woods and the clear waters of the Fleet are now buried deep underground, a conduit for North London’s excrement. Knowledge like this is a real secret London, landscapes that only exist in the mind, anchored in reality by survivors like the Old Church.
But what of the London that’s been utterly obliterated? Matt shows us his research into the defensive fortifications built to protect London during the Civil War. These were an enormously complex and large-scale construction project of which there is little or no trace. There’s not even any definitive maps of where they might have been, only guesses based on topology, slightly unreliable history books and street names. It’s disconcerting to think that huge things like these forts can not only vanish physically, but mentally too. It’s not like the Civil War was that long ago, relatively speaking. I can walk from my house and look at a city wall the Romans built, so you’d expect there to be some evidence around. Invisible forgotten structures like this are a great reminder of the transience of the city. What appears permanent can be wiped away very quickly by disaster, bombs or the simple and steady march of progress.
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| Where archaeologists think the wall and forts might have been. |
The contrast between what survives and what becomes hopelessly obscure is an interesting and seemingly illogical one. Matt outlines a series of secret disasters and tragedies that pepper the history of London, yet haven’t entered popular consciousness and don’t crop up in history books. These include a great fire on London Bridge in 1212. The bridge at this time had houses on it and when a fire began burning down the great cathedral at Southwark people rushed across to the south side of the bridge to rubberneck. Unfortunately winds carried embers across to the north side, setting the houses aflame there. Everyone on the bridge was now caught between two advancing infernos. An estimated 2,000 people died, the worst single disaster in the history of London. You won’t see any plaques in memorial to this or view any dramatic paintings of it in art galleries. Apparently even in history books about London Bridge there is scarcely a mention.
In a similar, and far more recent vein is a fire in Denmark Street in 1980, where 37 burned to death. Again no marker or memorial, the incident has almost completely disappeared from public consciousness, perhaps due to the fact that those who died were immigrants with few to publically mourn their deaths.
This is pretty miserable stuff, why would events like these be forgotten so readily? It’s hard to ascribe any kind of malice to this amnesia, yet in some cases it’s clear certain people would rather things be forgotten. In 1903 the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum caught fire. 52 female patients died in horrifying circumstances, their charred bodies found huddled together, pressed into corners as they futilely tried to escape the flames. So what of these dank rooms where terrified women gasped their last, desperate, smoke filled breaths? Nowadays you’re likely to find an IKEA sofa, or a huge flatscreen TV in that spot. Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum is now the charmingly named ‘Princess Park Manor’, luxury flats for discerning high flying Londoners. Matt tells us about the ‘history’ section on their (pretty crappy) website, explaining that they have the vaguest possible description of the place, not even bothering to mention that it was once a hospital let alone that it was the site of the worst peacetime fire in London since medieval times. These housing developers would just prefer we all forgot about that nasty business and focus on what’s important about the history of the place, namely that “the corridor that once ran across the width of the building was at one time the longest in Europe”. Wow. Now that’s history you can use!
The contrast to this crushing sense of doom is what’s unexpectedly remembered rather than forgotten. It’s 750AD, and a beautiful sunny day in the countryside that will eventually be north east London. Deep within a field a man looks wearily up from the sun and wipes the sweat from his brow. He thinks for a moment about the flagon of beer waiting for him back home, a reward for a hard day’s work. Buoyed with anticipation he cheerily whips his oxen on; the fields must be ploughed. He doesn’t live a particularly extravagant life, but he’s got his own hard won bit of land to farm and a family to feed. Life is good. There are men like him dotted all over Anglo-Saxon England, all of them fated to be lost to history. But not Mr Wemba.
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| An Anglo-Saxon farmer working his lea. Much like I imagine Mr Wemba may well have done. |
1,250 years later, the same spot. Thousands of drunken England fans stream across the concrete, flags waving, horns tooting, a riot of white and red. As one they chant ‘Wemba-ley Wemba-ley, Wemba-ley!”. This Anglo-Saxon farmer’s name has been passed down through the years, being immortalised in the globally famous ‘Wembley Stadium’. The etymology of place names is always fascinating, but particularly when it reaches back this far. Knowing the secret origins of these places lets you inhabit the past. A bus ride between Peckham and Brixton becomes a quest from a tiny village on the River Peck that ends at the ancient stone of the Saxon Lord Brixi. And then you can pop into the Ritzy for a pint. Reading about the distant past can feel impossibly alien, but secret and obscure knowledge like this underlines the fact that although conditions may be vastly different, we also have much in common with our ancestors.
After Matt had finished his talk he opened the floor to questions, with the caveat that we must all outline our idea of a secret part of London. Everyone had their own favourite spot and it’s uplifting that even in a city that occasionally feels full to bursting point there are still personal and private places. What I realised during this talk is that ‘secret London’ is not about pointing out obscure buildings or being able to list off trivia. It’s about the way that you apply your knowledge of the past to your present. Everyone has their own truly secret London mapped out in their heads. The park bench where you first kissed your partner, the Soho alleyway in which you gracelessly collapsed in a pile of your own vomit or simply the nicest place to get a drink. This concept is perhaps best visualised in Stephen Walter’s “The Island”, an immensely detailed personal map of the city. We all have one of these maps of London in our heads, a patchwork blanket of memories, practical knowledge, romance, history and drama. That’s a real secret London.
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| Stephen Walter's 'The Island' Click for bigger, but not quite big enough. Go and see it somewhere! |
Big thanks to Matt Brown for putting on such a great talk, for the London Transport Museum for helping organise it and to TFL for opening up the 10th floor of 55 Broadway as a venue.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
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Disclaimer: I know the brother of the lead actor.
The best rock star is a dead rock star. Plucked from the limelight in the full flush of their youth they’ll never age and are ripe for transformation into an eternal, hazy idealisation. Death is an excellent way to sand the abrasive edges from somebody, never again will they embarrass themselves on chat shows or be papped puking into their hat outside Floridita nightclub. It’s an even more excellent way to make money once you’ve scoured the archives for their musical leftovers and repackaged them into some kind of quasi-album just in time for Christmas.
“Last show… Tonight!” is about one of these stars and shows us their long, slow slide into the grave. Joe Brown (Barnaby Brookman) is the lead singer and guitarist of ‘The Brothers and Si Fletcher’. He’s a walking ego, self obsessed, cruel and manipulative with the manic nature of a Rik Mayall character. The cherry on top of this rancid cake is that he’s not even a particularly talented singer/songwriter. With his keyboardist brother (Danny Wainwright) and long-suffering drummer Si, (Tom Foy) the band have put out one successful and popular album before collapsing from alcohol abuse and lack of ideas.
The conceit of the show is that we’re the audience for Joe’s last concert. This means there’s a lot of music here, most of it played straight as if we were actually at the gig. Interspersed with the songs are bitchy interludes with the other band members, as well as flashbacks to key moments in Joe’s past that fill in the gaps of how he’s gotten to this point.
On paper Joe is an awful human being, and as the show relies on us sympathising with his plight he needs to be played just right. Fortunately Brookman pitches his performance pretty finely across the gap between loveable and obnoxious. Sure he’s loud, rude and self-centred, but we can see that he is basically a good person. Joe is a character that knows how rock stars are supposed to act; he seems fully aware that he’s living up to a stereotype. It’s this overlap between how he wants to act and how he’s expected to behave that gives the character pathos. This makes the performance multi-layered but coherent, whether he’s talking to his terminally ill alcoholic dad, teasing his bandmates on stage or pleading to be let in from the cold he’s still recognisably the same guy, just with different parts of his personality highlighted.
This exposes the masculine bravado of the rock star as a smokescreen for deeper and more serious problems. One scene that ties all this together is an interview on some cheesy chat show. The host is condescending and rude, privately gleeful he’s going to get some good footage. Joe is a figure of fun to him, the boozed musician being prodded and teased like a toothless lion. Joe is aware of this and initially plays up to the Oliver Reed-like role expected of him. It's nice when the cruelty of the host is undercut quickly and efficiently by Joe ‘admitting’ he’s an alcoholic. Real life intrudes and suddenly the host isn’t finding the interview so much fun. Now the shoe is on the other foot, Joe has transformed from jester to victim.
The fact that the character can consciously play with the way he’s perceived adds another layer of tragedy to him, a man aware he’s a figure of fun but unable to do anything about it or act any differently. This debauched rock star persona allows him to function as an alcoholic without too many raised eyebrows. We laugh when told of a time when Joe was supposed to be on stage in Glasgow and was found drunk in Belfast. In most other professions this’d be faintly tragic and depressing, but for a rock star? Hey, this is what he does right?
Joe is a genuinely interesting character, a worthy subject for drama. Unfortunately we don’t get to know him quite as well as I’d like. The play runs for about 90 minutes and a large part of that is made up of songs performed by Joe and his band. The show establishes pretty early on that Joe isn’t a particularly talented writer. He’s desperate to read out his poetry on stage, to the horror and embarrassment of his bandmates. When he finally does, it’s awful adolescent teenage stuff. His lyrics aren’t much better; we laugh at them because it’s funny that Joe takes them so seriously. These songs get the biggest laughs of the show, yet while they're being performed the narrative and character development totally freezes.
I initially figured that we'd learn about Joe through his lyrics and how he chooses to express himself, but there’s two problems with that. The first is that the lyrics are a bit bland, it’s difficult to recognise much of the blustering Joe we see between songs and therefore hard to get an idea what these lyrics might signify about his state of mind. The second is technical: I was sitting in the front row and even with the performers directly in front of me it was very difficult to understand the lyrics as the loud drums drowned them out.
The knock on effect of the songs occupying so much stage time is that every other character receives only cursory development. The most egregious example is the character played by Charlotte Whittaker. She’s Joe’s romantic interest and also pregnant with his child. Learning more about her is an excellent way to try and work out what makes Joe tick and she pbviously represents a rich seam of drama to mine. In the few, short scenes she gets Whittaker is great, she's definitely got the most compelling musical performance. So it’s disappointing that for much of the play she’s relegated to the role of the roadie bringing the microphone on and off stage.
Another problem with the amount of songs in the show is the popularity of Joe’s band. We can glean from the dialogue that “The Brothers and Si Fletcher” are hugely successful. The problem with this is that it just doesn’t correspond with what we see on stage; the band don’t look or sound successful in the slightest, behaving more like an average indie pub band. This creates a bit of a disconnect between what we see and what we’re hearing; this is a play with a down-to-earth grubby aesthetic, with knackered old fridges, cheap beer and stained t-shirts. None of this seems to square with even the remote sniff of success.
The basic concept of showing us a musician's last concert inevitably means there's going to be music played. It's difficult to think of any worthwhile way around it. Even so, the characters here would have more space to breathe with maybe a few songs cut out, or some existing ones trimmed a bit.
Despite these reservations, by the time the play ends the audience has a good handle on the who and why of Joe Brown. 'Last show... Tonight!' succeeds in creating a complex tragicomic hero that we eventually find ourselves caring about. This makes the final scenes unexpectedly touching, a good sign that the play has achieved its aims. This is a fairly modest play that's conscious of its limits, but performancewise it doesn't put a foot wrong and nails the tone. It's frequently very funny, and its running time flies by. Good stuff.
'Last show... Tonight!' has its last show... tomorrow! (the 28th of November) at the Rosemary Branch Theatre Pub.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Saturday, November 24, 2012
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| A happy LUPA audience. And no, I don't know what that child is holding. |
First up was a bit of a departure for LUPA; a full set by a band; 'WE'. Usually LUPA performances are by necessity fairly spartan affairs. Artists only have so much time to set up, and only so much space to store their props and equipment. This is probably a good thing; it's always a good maxim not to rely too much on technology for a performance. If something can screw up it will screw up.
There were four people in the band; two drummers up front, each with a single drum to beat on; two keyboard players at the back, one of which occasionally played bass or sax; all of them were singing at various points and frequently swapping instruments. I don't really want to categorise them too quickly, but broadly they play avant garde synth pop, with a (possibly intentionally) fragile and shaky amateurish feel to it. The music reminds me of early 80s experimental synth bands, hearkening back to a time when sounds like this were impossibly futuristic, the soundtrack of a brave new world to come. A good example (and one leapt into my mind during the show) is a scene from the brilliantly weird film 'Liquid Sky'.
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| 'WE' |
Unfortunately there are a few technical problems to the performance. The drumming is sometimes hesitant and nervy, as are their voices. Throughout this performance the band sing in chorus, and occasionally someone will come in little bit early, or hit a drum when I don't think they were supposed to. Fortunately in the context of LUPA I'm more than able to ignore the fact that someone's a bit unrehearsed or the occasional screwup, there's a tacit understanding here that the message or statement is more important than being slick. If this performance was part of a gig line up in a venue I might not be so sympathetic. But we're standing in a car park watching a band performing out of a garage. I can forgive a bit of scrappiness.
'WE' are one of the more interesting and eye-catching bands I've seen playing of late. They wear Klaus Nomi inspired tops with the attendant huge over-exaggerated shoulders and shiny obsidian boxes on their heads. While their sound might be synthy, they look liked they're aiming for a warped form of pop music; lyrically they sing extremely generalised platitudes at the audience, but appropriately enough given that they're named 'WE', they sing in plural: "We are here for you", "We love you" and so on. This is the era of Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj et al and there has been a resurgence of individualism in pop, but WE's outfits serve to wipe almost every identifying mark from the band. Here it's difficult even to tell which gender the performers identify as, the way they sing together means all personal affectations or flair have been surgically excised. It's a conscious roboticisation of pop, something that a sinister hivemind trying to emulate popular culture might try and produce to lure people in.
It's striking stuff, and if they really are trying to depersonalise pop they mostly succeed. At A six or seven song set made this a much longer performance than most LUPA sets. By the fourth song I thought they'd made their point, my feet were starting to get a bit numb and I was wondering what else was in store for the night. But this was a great way to start off a LUPA, and I did find myself feeling a bit sorry for whoever had to follow a performance as elaborate, fun and interesting as this.
One of the first things I'd seen when rounding the corner of James Campbell House was a paddling pool being filled with cold water. It was a cold night and immediately I pitied the performance artist who was going to end up in that. There's an unpleasant sadistic element to watching some performance art, a desire to watch some poor bastard making themselves miserable for my amusement.
The crowd gathered in a circle around the pool as (someone who I think was) Verity Whiter climbed into the pool holding an oar and began to splash the water about. The audience, fearful of getting wet, collectively took a step back. She put the oar down, bent over and began to splash the water with her hands, creating a halo of wet concrete around the pool. After a bit of this, Kate Mahoney joined her and they splashed together, then picked up the oars and silently walked off around the corner. The crowd remained silent, figuring perhaps there was more to this, but it soon became apparent that there wasn't and eventually some polite applause broke out.
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| Verity Whiter splashing about, looking a little bit like she's in Tron. |
I don't know exactly what to make of this. My first reaction was to think that they hadn't made as good use of such an interesting and exciting prop as they could have. A paddling pool full of cold water is dangerous. Admittedly it's dangerous in a safe way, but to an audience it's chaos and misery wrapped in blue plastic. What if we got water on us? The horror! We'd be all cold and wet! That would suck! It's November! Admittedly, worrying about getting a bit of water splashed on you is hardly the stuff that white knuckle nightmares are made of but even so nobody wants wet socks.
Throughout I kept expecting something big to happen, some definitive end to the performance. I think everyone else was too, which is why nobody knew whether to clap or not at the end. Perhaps this performance was a bit overshadowed by what preceded it, or maybe and understandably the artists involved didn't want to spend too long kneeling down in cold water on a chilly November evening. On the plus side, having returned home I find this performance does look very pretty under flash photography, so it at least has that going for it.
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| Kate Mahony soon joined her. |
After this I noticed that a long line of chairs had been laid out along the front of the line of garages. My immediate inclination is to get involved in whatever is going on, so I tried to make a beeline for them. But I got there too late and they'd all been occupied, presumably by people like me with chilly numb feet. As it turned out this was for the best. Before this next performance started, someone started shouting at us from the balconies above us. A very happy, friendly and slightly drunk woman was shouting down at us that we all looked beautiful. Inside the LUPA bubble it's easy to become a little blase and accustomed to bizarre stuff happening. This is why I always like it when random people wander around the corner to find, say, someone covered in snails. She took a photo of everyone and then announced her intentions to come down and join us. It's little happy and inclusive moments like this that prevent LUPA from being just another snottily serious art event with a stick wedged firmly up its arse.
Once these seats were occupied, Ann-Marie LeQuesne marched out in front of the crowd to explain what was going to happen. She launched into a long explanation of what she wanted the audience to do. I was a little apprehensive at this poin as all of this felt awfully complicated. My section of the audience was to march out in front of those seated, and repeatedly take particular kinds of bows in sequence to soak up the applause. Then we were to leave the 'stage' and then wait for a few "heartbeats" and come back on for more applause. Also there was something about a recording of a children's choir which I didn't really understand.
It's very strange how rewarding and uplifting it can be getting rapturous applause even though you haven't done anything to deserve it. As I stepped out in front of the crowd to greet their cheers I almost instantly lapsed into a faux-luvvie mental state and body language and began milking the crowd. I waved and cajoled them into further applause, behaving like a ridiculous egotistical applause-junkie. No wonder people say they can get addicted to this sort of thing. Even in wholly artificial form it's kind of a rush.
We stepped back for the applause and bows multiple times. This cheering and clapping seemed to loosen up the crowd a bit (that or they had gotten a bit drunk by now). The whooping kept going, all of sudden everyone was pitching in and it became a little difficult to stop the process. It's nice to see everyone smiling and enjoying some good vibes (even if to a large extent the whole process was play acted.
When Jordan and Kate stepped back in front of this crowd to announce the next act they duly received some of this applause, although I suppose they are at least deserving of it. I thought it was very strange how genuine and warm this whole experience felt, given that everyone was wildly applauding something that hadn't happened. Is this act some kind of social ritual that has a power of its own? Applause of some sort seems like a universal human reaction to events, maybe LeQuesne recognises this and has worked out that she can tap into it as and when she needs it.
The final performer was Joey Ryken. In a cloud of smoke, lit dramatically from below he ponderously made his way out of the garage. He was dressed all in black, with a very strange mask on, looking like a bargain basement Darth Vader. Just as I was wondering whether we were supposed be taking this dead seriously he popped the mask off and said "just kidding". It's a performance art joke! And a good one at that. Just like that he won the audience over.
Ryken is a very easy man to like, his stage persona is at once overly serious about what he's doing as well as self-mocking and ever so slightly innocently incompetent. It's a good mix, and made for more of a comedy act rather than what you'd expect out of performance art. The subject of this performance was the CIA's MKULTRA mind control program; Ryken wanted to try and reproduce one of their experiments in manipulating peoples emotions using music.
To this end he pulled two volunteers from the crowd, both strangers to each other and placed them inside a mirror box. There were two holes cut into the edge for their heads, and the mirror effect meant that there was nowhere for these volunteers to look except at the other person. Thrown into this disorientating atmosphere was a set of rapidly flashing LED lights placed on top of the box, and a large strobe light that Ryken himself was holding up. The soundtrack for the test was 'More Than A Feeling' by Boston, and when the ends of the box behind the men's heads were plugged up by large speakers the experiment could begin.
What made all this work so well is that Ryken takes it all so seriously. He has a grim, determined look on his face the entire time and gets hilariously indignant when his test subjects begin enjoying themselves and dancing. I found myself wishing I could see what it was like for the volunteers inside the box. As they danced they repeatedly and accidentally pulled the audio lead out of the player, which looked annoying for Ryken but proved to us that these people genuinely were undergoing some form of sensory deprivation. If this performance was just a comedy skit it would have been a success, but the fact that underneath all the humour there is something (very, very vaguely) serious going on makes it feel worthwhile. When the two volunteers emerged they actually did look disorientated and bit confused, it was oddly touching when they hugged each at the end of the test.
I think this was the best LUPA has ever been. There was some serious top flight stuff tonight, performances that make you feel privileged to turn up behind this garage in Bethnal Green and get to watch all this stuff for free. I don't know where else I'd go to watch performance art this eclectic, good natured and (for all it's ridiculousness) largely unpretentious.
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| Ann-Marie LeQuesne |
It's very strange how rewarding and uplifting it can be getting rapturous applause even though you haven't done anything to deserve it. As I stepped out in front of the crowd to greet their cheers I almost instantly lapsed into a faux-luvvie mental state and body language and began milking the crowd. I waved and cajoled them into further applause, behaving like a ridiculous egotistical applause-junkie. No wonder people say they can get addicted to this sort of thing. Even in wholly artificial form it's kind of a rush.
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| The audience. |
When Jordan and Kate stepped back in front of this crowd to announce the next act they duly received some of this applause, although I suppose they are at least deserving of it. I thought it was very strange how genuine and warm this whole experience felt, given that everyone was wildly applauding something that hadn't happened. Is this act some kind of social ritual that has a power of its own? Applause of some sort seems like a universal human reaction to events, maybe LeQuesne recognises this and has worked out that she can tap into it as and when she needs it.
The final performer was Joey Ryken. In a cloud of smoke, lit dramatically from below he ponderously made his way out of the garage. He was dressed all in black, with a very strange mask on, looking like a bargain basement Darth Vader. Just as I was wondering whether we were supposed be taking this dead seriously he popped the mask off and said "just kidding". It's a performance art joke! And a good one at that. Just like that he won the audience over.
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| Joey Ryken |
To this end he pulled two volunteers from the crowd, both strangers to each other and placed them inside a mirror box. There were two holes cut into the edge for their heads, and the mirror effect meant that there was nowhere for these volunteers to look except at the other person. Thrown into this disorientating atmosphere was a set of rapidly flashing LED lights placed on top of the box, and a large strobe light that Ryken himself was holding up. The soundtrack for the test was 'More Than A Feeling' by Boston, and when the ends of the box behind the men's heads were plugged up by large speakers the experiment could begin.
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| The volunteers inside the box, with two helpers making sure the whole thing holds together. |
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| There was a lot of fiddling during this performance. |
So I was a little sad to find out that apparently LUPA has an expiry date, and will be finishing the coming summer. This seems very far away right now, but I'm sure it'll roll around quicker than I anticipate. But then this knowledge just makes me determined to attend every time it's on and enjoy it as much as is humanly possible.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
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Cinema can be an exceptionally cruel world to its inhabitants. To be a character trapped in a film is to face extraordinary ordeals with no promise of redemption at the end. Watching a film like this can feel like you're enjoying pulling the legs off a spider, experiencing a vicarious sadism in just how bad things can get for someone. That 'someone' in 'The Hunt' is Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), a divorced nursery school teacher trying to win custody of his teenage son. He’s respected in his small community, great with kids and on the verge of regaining the loving family life he desires. This hopeful positivity collapses when one of the children he’s looking after falsely accuses him of child abuse. The accusations spiral out of control, and Lucas becomes a pariah, hated and feared.
Watching ‘The Hunt’ is not an especially cheery experience. I went into it knowing very little about the plot other than that Very Bad Things were going to happen to the central character. The film begins by giving us an extended look at the way this small town Danish community functions. We see how well Lucas gets along with the local children; he leads them home when they’re lost and empathises with them if their parents are arguing. He knows all the fathers well and we see them happily hunting and drinking together. Throughout these tranquil scenes there’s a solid and sinister background hum. The gods of cinema are capricious; what is the point of showing us something functioning and healthy if not to then infect it and allow us to clinically observe its painful thrashing? With this in mind, the disgrace of Lucas begins to feel like a crushing inevitability. From the moment the innocently vindictive child Klara (Annika Wedderkopp, a brilliant child actor) opens her mouth to accuse her teacher the die is cast. With grim relentlessness the lie snowballs, with each repetition gaining more victims and sick new details.
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| Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen) |
The instigator of the lie that fuels the events of ‘The Hunt’ is a young child and Vinterberg quickly absolves her of blame. She recognises that she’s done a bad thing, but when she tries to take it back nobody listens to her. The adults assume that she’s repressing traumatic memories and ironically it’s their actions and words that construct the reality they fear most.
As we watch the parents spinning this lie into something bigger and scarier by the day we’re confronted by an uneasy fact: on some level these people want Lucas to be a child molester. It’s a fiction that suits them, one they’re happy to believe in, contribute to and embellish. They’re told to keep an eye out for extremely vague symptoms of suspected child abuse in their own children like nightmares and depressed behaviour. All of this ‘evidence’ mounts up against Lucas, he becomes exactly what the town needs to despise: an outsider, an interloper, a monster: the other.
This film has been interpreted as a portrait of the breakdown of a community, but I disagree. This community does not break down, if anything they become more tightly knit when given a communal hate target. In the opening scenes we see married couples bitterly arguing with each other, but as Lucas becomes a scapegoat these arguments cease. Throughout this picturesque little Danish town there’s an undercurrent of repressed violence, for example the walls of the houses are covered with the heads and skins of shot animals. How thin is the line between comfortable bourgeois life and the pack psychology of the violent animal?
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| Lucas and his ex-best friend Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen) |
Humanity gets a pretty rough ride in ‘The Hunt’, instinctively this community operates under an unthinking stupidity. People believe what they want to believe and if the story starts to look a bit shaky they’ll unthinkingly create a new set of lies to reinforce it. This process is incredibly frustrating to watch, particularly when we see the adults putting words into the mouths of the children while they're being interviewed.
Scenes like these demonstrate how adults can exploit the blurriness between reality and fantasy for young children. Klara knows she is lying when she makes the initial accusation and tries to take it back. She’s reassured by the adults that this really did happen to such an extent that eventually she can’t be sure that she wasn't abused. A similar process used on the other children, who begin concocting a detailed story about Lucas abusing them in his basement. The film tells us that children are mentally malleable, so the horrifying conclusion is that these parents are giving their children false memories of abuse. If they have memories that they believe to be true what difference does it make whether they were actually abused?
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| Grethe (Susse Wold) and Klara (Annika Wedderkopp) |
In the centre of this whirlwind of vicious gossip and recrimination sits Lucas. Mikkelsen is intensely fragile here. The role of Lucas could easily be used an excuse for an actor to give an emotionally overwrought, histrionic, Oscar baiting performance, but he underplays almost everything. This is a man that is trying to keep himself together and conduct himself with dignity even as his world turns against him. For the most part he's remarkably composed, behaving with a heartbreaking naivety that gives way to suppressed paranoia. This makes his moments of weakness and anger that much more effective. These are few and far between, generally Lucas endures the misery inflicted on him by this town with a numb stoicism. There are moments in the film where he is almost Christlike in his suffering. In one scene the townspeople can barely bring themselves to look at his bruised and bleeding face. Here, rather than appearing pathetic and beaten, Mikkelsen has a palpable aura of holy martyrdom.
Vinterberg is a careful and precise director. The mental deterioration of Lucas is matched with the increasingly untidiness of both his appearance and his home. Dishes sit in the sink undone and piles of dirty clothes lay haphazardly on the stairs. Lighting also plays a large part in adding atmosphere, generally the darker the film gets, the darker the colour palette. This is especially evident in the way Vinterberg lights the children. When they’re lying and scared they are shrouded in shadow, lit faintly and eerily from below.
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| You'd be miserable too if you were him. |
‘The Hunt’ is a great film, but very hard to watch. It functions as a useful lesson on the importance of scepticism, and the need for evidence and proof rather than gossip and hearsay. Even so as the film ends it hasn’t given us a solution to the situation it presents. We can't ignore allegations of abuse made by children, allegations that by their nature won’t necessarily have any evidence behind them. Equally we cannot destroy people’s lives on the basis of wild accusations and hysteria. The film ends on a discomforting and depressing note. The stupidly paranoid behaviour showcased in this film is not unique to these characters, it’s embedded deep within the human psyche and will never, ever go away.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
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‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a film about mental illness. We follow the story of Pat (Bradley Cooper), sufferer of a bipolar disorder. As the film opens he's being released from a state mental institution after serving a sentence for violently beating someone half to death. He suffers from intense mood swings, turning on a knife edge from happy and upbeat to depressive and violent.
David O. Russell has created a film that pulls itself in two directions at once. It’s obviously striving to present an accurate and sympathetic view of various types of mental disorder but is shackled to the conventions of the romantic comedy. These two ‘genres’ (if ‘mental illness film’ is really a genre) sit uneasily together.
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| Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) and Pat (Bradley Cooper) |
The narrative shows us Pat’s attempts to conquer his condition and reintegrate himself into a society that’s suspicious and scared of him. They’re scared of him with good reason though, he lacks a filter on his words and actions, frequently acting inappropriately and with no empathy for how he might come across to others. While he’s constantly feeling some kind of extreme emotion, he entirely lacks the apparatus to identify how he’s affecting those around him. He’ll burst into his parent’s bedroom late at night to rant about Ernest Hemingway and throw a book through the window, or run up and hug a visibly frightened ex-colleague.
Pat is not the most likeable filmic hero. Throughout the film he operates under the illusion that he’s going to get his marriage back together, which everyone around him can immediately tell is not going to happen. People try to let him down gently and get him to see that his wife probably isn’t coming back. He labours under the illusion that their love is unbreakable, even after she’s had an affair and he’s nearly beaten a man to death in front of her.
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| Pat's parents, Dolores (Jacki Weaver) and Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro) |
Into this tangled world comes the equally complicated Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). She’s a recent widow and ever since her husband died has been undergoing an alienating nymphomania. To the obvious disgust and embarrassment of her family she’s been having sex with nearly everybody she comes across. It’s gotten to the point where she’s been fired from her job for sleeping with everyone in the office. So can these two damaged people come together and help each other with their problems?
But it’s not just our two leads that are suffering psychic pains. One of the points the film makes is that the dividing line between those that are diagnosed mentally atypical and those that appear to lead normal lives is blurred. Nearly every character in the film appears to be dealing with some kind of problem, be it an obsessive compulsive disorder, violent fits of rage or a hidden depression. Russell is much more sympathetic to those like Pat and Tiffany who are honest enough to recognise their own problems and has a deep respect for the methods they use to try and fix themselves.
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| also Chris Tucker is in this film. |
Both Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence have raging internal storms constantly bubbling behind their performances. They’re portraying people that are not only volatile, but to some degree also have the knowledge that they can ‘get away with it’. The two have both been damaged in some way, so both have an 'excuse' for their actions. One of Cooper’s best tactics is to use his wide, bright blue eyes to show Pat's terrifying clearness and confidence in his actions. The disconnect between how sure he is that his course is the right one and what we in the audience know to be true makes him both tragic and fairly frightening. Cooper is confident in a difficult role, and in less skilled hands runs a risk of losing audience sympathy altogether.
Lawrence is a good match for him, her and Cooper bounce off each other realistically and reflexively. She doesn’t have quite as many emotional gears to shift into as he does, but this is more of a function of her character rather than a limitation in her performance. What she does fantastically is the transformation from reserved, cool and collected to towering, violent, frustrated rage. There’s a physical change that comes over her in one scene that’s a marvel to behold, it’s like suddenly there’s a completely different person that’s sprung out of the character.
The world that these two inhabit is as carefully constructed as the two central characters. Due to their mental states, both Pat and Tiffany live and are dependant on their parents. Russell takes the same kind of downbeat look at working class American life as he did in ‘The Fighter’, although with a slightly softer touch. The film takes place in an overcast suburbia, row after row of identical houses, identical streets and nosy neighbours. This endless downtrodden domestic conformity gets to you after a while, but does the job of making our leads stand out like sore thumbs.
It’s clear that everyone involved here is sincere in making a film that aims to educate us about what it is like suffering from or living with a person with a mental disorder. The characters are treated with nothing but dignity, even in their most unsympathetic moments we at least understand why they are doing what they’re doing. Despite this, the film does use the pretty lame cliche of saying ‘maybe the ones who’ve been diagnosed with mental illness are actually the sane ones?’
This film has genuine flashes of complexity, and when it resorts to cliché like this it falls flat. Russell goes some way to justify this by making nearly every other character in the film a bubbling pit of vague symptoms, but this ends up feeling like a clever way to dodge the point. ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ doesn’t exactly glamorise mental illness, but that fact that it propels the central love story means some of the rough edges are necessarily sanded down.
For the vast majority of the running time ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is a downbeat, bittersweet indie drama. The last quarter of the film feels like it’s been parachuted in from a glossy, conventional romantic comedy. Suddenly these damaged characters that we’ve gotten to know are acting relatively normally, and the focus shifts not onto whether they’re healing mentally, but bizarrely, onto their dancing skills. The argument the film puts forward is that their dancing skills are directly linked to their mental health, but after treading so carefully on this territory for the first 90 minutes it becomes very clumsy, very fast.
It’s a let down. We have it impressed upon us that this is an impossibly complex situation with no easy solutions, but the film takes a tonal swerve, shows us that actually there are easy solutions and ties everything up in a neat little bow. A happy ending and roll credits.
Other criticisms include the fact that this film assumes you have a knowledge of American Football, and specifically know a vague history of the Philadelphia Eagles. Characters repeatedly reference events in the history of this team, which may be common knowledge in the US, but I’ve got no idea what the hell they’re talking about and there’s not enough context to figure it out.
The climax of the film involves a ridiculously complex bet on which all the emotional and financial woes of our characters rest. The set up for this bet is one of the most interminable and confusing scenes I’ve seen in a film lately, and assumes you’ve got a knowledge of both American Football and US betting lingo. There’s a protracted negotiation of ‘points’ on a bet and just when this is decided, the characters begin discussing transforming the already complex bet into a parlay (I didn’t know what this was). To be fair they include a clumsy bit of exposition after the scene is over that translates it all into plain English, but it’s too little too late. If the audience is watching the set up to the big climax and they don’t know what the hell anyone is talking about, it saps urgency from the film and replaces it with alienation and confusion.
‘Silver Linings Playbook’ for the most part is an achingly sincere film that clearly cares a great deal about its subject matter. It’s got a solid core of talent and some deftly and sensitively sketched characterisation. But it can’t work out what it wants to be. Does it want to be an serious indie drama about mental illness or a conventional rom-com with two sweet, attractive leads? By trying to do both it doesn’t succeed at either.
‘Silver Linings Playbook’ is on general release from 21st November 2012
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