LONDON CITY NIGHTS

Friday, July 24, 2015

'Festivus' at the Old Red Lion, 23rd July 2015

Friday, July 24, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

A music festival is a deeply strange place. For a couple of days a community forms with collective aim of drinking themselves senseless, gobbling drugs and dancing like morons. The rules of polite society are suspended; everyone is filthy, drunk, dressed weirdly and extremely sleep-deprived. Far from home, with phone batteries failing and increasingly bruised psyches, these places are pressure kegs of heightened emotion.

This makes it all the more surprising that hardly anyone has exploited it as a dramatic setting. In terms of documentary there's Michael Wadleigh's excellent Woodstock - but after 45 years it's more historical document than a reflection of a modern festival. A much more contemporary take is 2011's You, Instead, shot at T in the Park - but unfortunately it's a crap film.  

Enter Festivus. This production ambitiously seeks to recreate the music festival vibe on stage - dishing up a tragic-comic tale of four pricks having an absolutely awful time. They are: Nathan (Sami Larabi), laddish and violent; Tom (Jamie O'Neill), smugly condescending; Laura (Sally Horwill), a ditzy emotional vacuum; and Danielle (Rosie Porter), a bit vain (but actually not so bad). As they took the stage I sensed a collective crawling of skin in the audience - these are the worst kind of festival-goers.

Arrogant and posh, they wobble about the place in an amphetamine haze chucking plastic bags full of shit into people's tents, knocking over pints and wallowing in their own hedonism. It's bad enough when these people pitch up camp near you, but to be trapped in a play with them for 90 minutes? Annoyance beckons. Then everything starts goes wrong. As the narcotics scour away their inhibitions, secrets and lies surface. Under heaping dollops of schadenfreuden, misery reigns.

The characters' transformations dramatise the idea of the festival environment revealing your 'true self'. After all, with the bondage of society temporarily loosened you can play at who you really are. For many this means dressing like a twat and falling face down into mud, but for others it's a genuinely transformative experience. At a festival you don't have to worry about how you're perceived, you can take as many illicit substances as you can handle and you're surrounded by thousands of other hedonists. After all, Glastonbury Bestival et al are distant echoes of the ur-festival experiences: Bronze Age gatherings for the Solstice, the Viking festival of Mabon or the Roman Bacchanalia. 

It's the last that's most relevant here, where half the characters are dressed in Roman Centurion armour, the other in Greek Togas. It underlines the play's point of modern festival as Bacchanalia, that ancient quasi-religious miasma of "wine-fueled violence and violent sexual promiscuity, in which the screams of the abused were drowned out by the din of drums and cymbals". Festivus subtly dwells on these dark Roman origins, showing us that freedom to 'do what thou wilt' can rapidly descend into blood-red nightmares.

Sally Horwill as Laura

Writing like this can only be borne of direct experience, which this script has in spades. A cool naturalism runs through almost every interaction, the best (and funniest) moments being when Tom and Laura go through the motions of an argument, the bored Tom cycling through platitudes until he hits the right combination and Laura instantly cheers up. The darker moments also impress, particularly Sam Larabi's descent into the red mist.

Then there's the well observed nuances of festival life. The difficulties in finding your friends, rummaging through a messy tent, getting used to chugging down neat vodka, people doing bumps of MDMA off their housekeys, fretting over phone batteries and the distant bassy beat of the dance tent. These moments are part of the fabric the experience, familiar to millions yet all too rarely seen on stage or screen.

Festivus does quite a bit right, making its flaws that much more disappointing. Prime among them is the lack of an ending. The narrative structure revolves around revelations - everyone betrays everyone else to one extent or another. We're primed for the fallout of all this - but never get to see it. Characters reaching the pinnacle of their dramatic arcs just disappear off stage, never to return. Perhaps there's an argument that missing important moments is appropriate to a festival, but it robs us of emotional catharsis. When the lights go up at the end there's a feeling of "oh, that's it?".

But Festivus inarguably succeeds in bottling that strange, intense festival atmosphere. There's a sense of barely-controllable chaos sweeping across the stage, heralded by rustling waves of trash and booming bass. Okay, so there's the occasional duff line, the characters sometimes tip over into the genuinely infuriating and narrative is a bit stunted, but the spirit of the piece shines through. This alone makes it worth a watch; the show a kaleidoscope of frazzled memories that neatly captures a very particular kind of contemporary experience.

Also worthy of mention is a short, experimental film shown on an Oculus Rift VR set. This complements the main production well, and works as a decent proof-of-concept for VR cinema. If you go to Festivus be sure to check it out.

★★★★

Festivus is at C. Nova, Edinburgh August 5-16, 18-31. Tickets here.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

'Belle' (2014) directed by Jon Max Spatz

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

In Belle we see a woman confronted with obsolescence. It's the morning of the sixteenth birthday of her beautiful daughter, Belle and time has come a-knockin' for her mother.  In painful scenes she, perhaps for the first time, truly understands the horror of oncoming decrepitude and suffers a hallucinatory freakout: a blur of bondage, blades, blood and thick gloopy, suffocating makeup.  This is an uncomfortable, claustrophobic and short horror film with the aim of inducing a nightmare state.  And it's all sponsored by the Jobcentre.

As I outlined in my previous article on Belle's production, every Head of Department on the film was assisted by a trainee supplied by the Jobcentre.  These are young people who, perhaps foolishly, explained to their adviser that they wanted to work in film.  As one of the trainees, Guy Larsen, explained, he was ready to be laughed out of the room when he said this, probably figuring his destiny was Workfare slavery in the Poundland salt mines.  But, (I imagine to his surprise) his advisor got him a placement as Assistant Director on Belle. 

That such a weird little short is preceded by the Jobcentre logo feels like one in the eye for bureaucracy, a subversion of a system designed to produce minimum-wage (or no-wage) slaves.  You'd assume that the natural product of a collaboration between artists and the Jobcentre would be neutered: horror playing it safe with all the awfulness that implies.  But Belle feels like its slipped through the cracks, bypassing the censor's pen and miraculously arriving fully-formed and odd as they come.

Even better, this isn't something the Jobcentre are trying to sweep under the rug; they appear genuinely proud of these results.  At the premiere John Paul-Marks, Work Services Director at Jobcentre Plus, explained his pride in placing young jobseekers in proper creative roles, looking pleased as punch to have something positive to talk for once.  Also speaking was Esther McVey, Minister for Employment, who, presumably after getting a whiff of potentially positive press, attached herself to proceedings like some horrible woman shaped barnacle.

I'm going to assume that neither of these people, especially not McVey, had seen the film prior to the screening.  I like to imagine they felt a quiver of apprehension when they saw what their organisations had begotten.  You can imagine the Daily Mail now; "Your taxes at work as Minister for Employment attends government funded bizarro art horror short." All this background gives the film a pinch of subversive spice that adds a nice extra-textual bite to the night.

Fortunately, though all this behind the scenes funding stuff is fascinating for film production and political geeks, Belle is a pretty wonderful short film.  Though the location is middle class domesticity, the real setting is the face of lead actor Lindsey Readman.  Her character works in fashion and is painfully aware of every crease and sag across her face and body, Spatz mercilessly subjects to her to endless clinical closeups, framing and lighting her features not with an eye to for unflattery, but rather towards honesty.

The pinnacle of this is a shot of Readman getting dressed in the bedroom.  It's full frontal nudity, though relaxed and entirely unsexualised.  This is the kind of image you just don't get to see often in film and works wonders in immediately summarising the aims and ambitions of Belle.  But it's in the facial close-ups, scored to woozily distorted piano that the short finds its true rhythm.  There's a bravery here both in front and behind the camera lens; the actors allowing the audience to scrutinise their beauty and the director in trusting that these images are interesting enough to keep the audience's attention. It's in the (perhaps unconscious) movements of her facial muscles that the mother's character lies, particularly in the scene where she applies makeup with a King Canute-ish weariness.  It's a performance marked by subtlety and attention to detail, and without Readman it's questionable whether the film would have worked half as well as it does.

So, tonally and visually Belle just plain works, my only criticism is the length. To properly grapple with something as weighty as the expectations on women to conform to standards of beauty and wider philosophical notions of mortality and being superceded by youth cries out for a longer run-time.  Though Belle successfully approaches these topics, the limited run time means that it only scratches the surface.  The short finishes at the precise moment it feels like we're going somewhere, the finale not so much a conclusion as the moment when things get really interesting.  The themes that Belle attempts to convey are so resonant that as the credits roll, we wish that we'd just seen the opening of a film rather than a self-contained short.

Still, hungering for more is definitely a good sign.  Belle isn't notable just because of the unique circumstances behind its production, it's an intelligent, technically competent and promising piece of cinema that deserves to be widely seen.  I have no idea if the production team have ambitions to turn it into a full-length feature, but if they do they've sown a fertile thematic field with Belle that should bear a bountiful cinematic harvest.

★★★★