British Films – Bitch Flicks

’45 Years’: A Lifetime of Honing Talent

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the unspoken knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia.

The end of the year, just in time to qualify for the Oscars, is when we usually get at least a few films that feature actors we first saw when they were young and beautiful (or in the case of a performer like Bill Murray, not so beautiful) who, now that they’re around retirement age, are playing either irascible old coots (and their gender-switched twins: old ladies who swear a lot) or characters who show that life invariably becomes pathetic and tragic for those who age, as the leads in Michael Haneke’s Amour did a few years back. You’d never know from these films that some of the most powerful men in the mainstream movie industry are approaching or are over 70 (women in the business apparently are not allowed to be that age and keep their jobs)–and they aren’t shitting their pants nor have their personalities magically changed into the curmudgeonly but loveable stereotypes their own films are littered with.

Out writer-director Andrew Haigh best known for the film Weekend and as the co-creator of the now-cancelled HBO series Looking has decades before he turns 70, but in his new film 45 Years (opening Dec. 23) which he adapted from a short story by David Constantine, he treats the older, straight, married couple who are the film’s focus with the complexity that other filmmakers reserve for characters under 50. Charlotte Rampling plays Kate, a retired schoolteacher living in a home in rural England with her husband. Confident and warm but with razor sharp cheekbones, she wears boots and jeans for her daily morning’s walk with the dog as if she just stepped out of a Land’s End catalog, senior division.

When we first meet her, Kate seems, like a lot of older women, serene in the knowledge that she’s at least a little too good for her unshaven, bumbling husband, Geoff (Tom Courtenay) who may or may not have the early symptoms of dementia. She’s the one who knows where to find the German dictionary in their house when he needs one and corrects him when he gets the facts of an old news item wrong. But she doesn’t seem to resent her role as the competent, dependable spouse and brings a lot of tenderness to her interactions with Geoff, holding his hand or bringing him tea when he’s upset and preparing every meal and cleaning up afterward without complaint. I always notice, in films as in life, when women are the ones doing all the cooking and dish washing and 45 Years is one of the few films–and one of the only ones directed by a man–which seemed to notice along with me.

Kate is also the one who plans their social calendar, including the big party in a rented hall for their 45th wedding anniversary, delayed from the one they planned for their 40th when Geoff had open heart surgery. She’s even sure of the songs that should be played, politely insisting, “No Elton John”

The use of music in this film is some of the best I’ve ever heard–without any of the selections being obscure or surprising. These songs are precisely the ones that would play on an older person’s car radio and for their anniversary party and we’ve heard them many times before, but in this film, especially in the song that plays over the closing credits, we hear them in a new way, just as Kate comes to see her marriage with a new perspective. The other touches in the film are equally expert, from the cinematography of Lol Crawley to a supporting performance by Geraldine James as the couple’s (especially Kate’s) longtime friend.

So many other films (like the the execrable Youth) can’t show older characters without making cheap jokes about their bodies and diminished capacities. Even when we see this couple getting ready for bed and sex the two are never held up for ridicule, though Geoff , slowly pounding around the scar on his bare chest, like a superannuated Tarzan, seems to be making fun of himself. The film is about Rampling’s Kate but it wouldn’t work if Geoff were not equally well-written and Courtenay weren’t such a good foil. His Geoff is not above flattering Kate or playing the fool to appease her suspicions. In an early scene he defuses what in a shorter marriage might have turned into an argument with a wide-eyed admission, “I don’t remember.”

Seeing an older woman in crisis in a film without also seeing her humiliated (or looking very disheveled) is unusual. And we’re affected more by the increasing uncertainty Kate feels because of the calm we’ve seen her radiate in the early scenes. Haigh never robs Kate of her dignity, even during her dinner table confrontation with Geoff, “I’d like to be able to tell you everything I’m thinking,” she says, “but I can’t.”

Haigh does what more filmmakers should do with older performers: incorporate our own memories of them as younger actors into their characters, the way we see in older relatives and friends the traces of their younger selves. Sarah Polley proved she understood this desire when at the beginning of Away From Her (the first film she directed) she showed the woman who will be played by Julie Christie when she was in her twenties–and the young actress had a ’60s hairstyle Julie Christie might have worn and had the young Christie’s energetic and playful presence. Haigh pointedly avoids showing us what Rampling and Courtenay’s characters looked like when they were younger because we (at least those of us who watch British movies) already know–from the films the actors made in the era their characters discuss. The early ’60s which Geoff relives when he gets a reminder of a tragedy that happened then, is also when Courtenay starred in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The mid-sixties, when Geoff and Kate first met at a dance, was when Rampling made her film debut in Georgy Girl opposite the equally young Alan Bates and Lynn Redgrave.

Many films have characters who are a little (or a lot!) slow on the uptake, so that the audience can congratulate themselves on how much smarter they are than the people onscreen. Several times during 45 Years we assume Rampling’s Kate is overreacting, but as the movie continues, we understand that a woman married to a man for 45 years knows him better than we do. She questions him and knows what to ask when she feels like he could be hiding something from her. Sometimes Kate second-guesses Geoff so accurately that her intuition seems supernatural, until we realize we are just seeing the result of a very long relationship. And unlike the dreary, hackneyed revelations of By the Sea, what Kate finds out shocks us as much as it does her: it isn’t something Geoff could have “forgotten” to tell her.

When (not if) Rampling is nominated for awards for playing Kate, she’ll be called a “sentimental favorite” but her performance, like the relationship at the film’s center is a culmination of experience. Rampling was a fixture of “swinging ’60s” London who hung out with The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Over the course of her long career, she’s worked with an astonishing list of talents: Visconti and Ozon were her directors and she was the leading lady opposite both Paul Newman and Robert Mitchum. The last look and gesture she leaves us with in 45 Years is the unmistakable answer to a question we’ve been asking ourselves throughout the last scenes of the film. If she wins awards for this role, it will be because she’s earned them, not because she’s outlasted her peers.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXAnjA9tAnQ” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘Pride’: A Fun “Feel Good” Movie About A Very “Feel Bad” Time

Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working class (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the U.S. but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat, rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one village’s striking Welsh miners and their families.

The “feel good” British comedy that also has working-class characters overcoming their homophobia was, for a time, a popular enough genre that it could’ve had its own section in video stores, which were also plentiful then. I’m thinking of films like Kinky Boots, which is now a Broadway musical and starred a pre-12 Years a Slave Chiwetel Ejiofor as the drag queen designer who saves the factory of the working class town, and The Full Monty, whose lineup of mostly working-class, bored, unemployed guys-turned-strippers by the end included a couple in love. Although I enjoyed The Full Monty (which had an acute enough take on class that it played like a comedic version of Das Kapital–with flashes of skin) by the time Kinky Boots came out, in 2005, I’d had enough of twinkle-eyed, straight characters smiling at their new-found “tolerance.” So I was hesitant to see Pride (which opens Sept. 26) with a plot synopsis (queer people help striking miners in Thatcherite Britain, loosely based on a true story), title, and even a movie poster that easily could have come from the ’90s.

Although director Matthew Warchus isn’t gay, the screenwriter Stephen Beresford is, which, after seeing the film, my gaydar told me even before I looked up his bio. The film starts and ends with the queer characters, not the working-class, (mostly) straight people, as the focus. Mark (Ben Schnetzer, who’s from the US but went to drama school in London) keeps a huge, “Thatcher Out” banner hanging from the windows of his flat and rallies his friends and closeted newbie Joe (George MacKay) to collect money for striking coal miners as Lesbians and Gays Support The Miners–LGSM (because in those days most queer groups didn’t acknowledge the participation of bisexual and trans people). “Mining communities are being bullied just like we are,” Mark explains to the others, and the group ends up befriending one Welsh village’s striking miners and their families.

I lived in London six months before the events in the film start and Pride gets the period exactly right: the music of The Smiths plays at a queer party and Pete Shelley’s “Homosapien” and Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round” play at the queer clubs. Post-punk fashions are popular among the queers (as they were among many young Londoners then) but we see the era’s big earrings, shiny shirts, stonewashed jeans, permed hair, and Bo Derek braids (!) on queer characters too. The miners’ strike was big news: when I was back in the US more than one British import record, popular on college radio, included snippets of speeches from striking miners. And, as I’ve written elsewhere, people from most walks of British life had a fierce, abiding hatred of Margaret Thatcher.

Because the film doesn’t have only one or two queers to focus on, its characters, like Dear White People‘s Black characters, show a range of different personalities and life experiences that we’re not used to seeing in mainstream films. Mark is a funny, committed activist with the gift of gab who looks great in a black leather motorcycle jacket. He asks a crowd, when remarking on how the police have started beating up striking miners instead of harassing patrons of queer clubs, “Do you think they got sick of all that Donna Summer?” Reticent, neatly dressed, 20-year-old Joe is a college student who lives with his parents, so even though he spends much of his time doing work with an openly queer group he is not out to any of his family. We even meet a few queer women: Steph (Faye Marsay) in a mohawk and heavy eyeliner becomes Joe’s best friend and two women who are a couple join the group after they hear a rousing speech in a queer London club from village miner Dai (Paddy Considine in an unflattering period haircut).

We first meet Jonathan (Dominic West who played Jimmy on The Wire) trashed and in full drag, who, after a full day and night celebrating Pride, doesn’t quite succeed, despite persistent, enthusiastic attempts, in blowing the whistle around his neck. In spite of Jonathan being the kind of camp character whom other films (especially those made by straight people) rarely use for anything more than a few good quips and some attitude, he does turn out to have a political conscience. And some of the loveliest moments in the film are glimpses of his tender relationship with his partner: quiet, serious Gethin (out gay actor Andrew Scott whom some may recognize played Moriarty on Sherlock), the owner of the gay bookstore where the group meets. West, playing against type, makes us believe in Jonathan as a whole person, not just a caricature, though in one showy scene he can’t quite stop himself from dancing more like a straight man than a queenie, gay guy.

The film also shows nuanced portraits of the women villagers: Sian (Jessica Gunning) looks like a miner’s wife: short and busty, her pretty face framed by a mullet (in those days not just a hairstyle for older lesbians). But she doesn’t act like the little woman. She, along with Dai are the first villagers to argue that the queer group should be invited to the local hall just as the other groups who have supported the miners have been. “Your gays have arrived,” one of the older women from the village tells the two of them when the group comes to town in a van.

During their visit Jonathan coaches Sian on the legal ins and outs of being stopped and arrested for no reason (until relatively recently, police regularly harassed and arrested white queer people as they now do with Black people and trans women of color). Sian then goes to the jail and gets the police to release the illegally detained miners. We also see Imelda Staunton as Hefina show off her considerable comic abilities, quite a change from her work in movies like Vera Drake. The cast is uniformly excellent: Bill Nighy is also on hand, barely recognizable here as a slick-haired, slouched, shy villager.

Films about activism, especially queer activism, usually skip the part about it being great fun as well as a good way to get laid. We see the joy the group gets out of their work and Joe hooks up with the cute guy who asks him at “Pits and Perverts” (which would have been a better title for the movie) a benefit concert organized by LGSM, “Are you going to take my picture too?”

In many ways Pride is a very conventional film. Its script has the regulation triumph-setback-triumph structure that keeps many mainstream films from having the twists and complications that make documentaries like Stories We Tell and One Cut, One Life great. But the mix of real-life characters and events keeps Pride from becoming saccharine. The miners were striking to return to hard work that meant an early death for many of them (as well as repercussions for the environment), but they knew that work and the union were all they had. When they lost the strike the mining communities became impoverished and, with the eventual closure of the mines, remain so to this day.

Unlike a lot of films and TV shows that take place in the past, Pride‘s portrait of the ’80s isn’t clouded by nostalgia. The film shows that being shunned or kicked out of one’s family for being queer was the norm back then (though in best case scenarios the rift was temporary). A record company receptionist tells the group (when they are looking for bands for the benefit) that they don’t have any queer artists on their label–as we see posters of Elton John (who many forget was briefly married to a woman in the ’80s) and Soft Cell in the hall. And although the screenwriter is a politically aware gay man, he still gets feminism wrong. The script seems to disparage the women who form a separate group the same way the core characters do. But in the 90s I belonged to a queer activist group and gay men talked right over the women, even as we packed up and left to strike out on our own.

In a postscript we find out one of the real-life characters in LGSM died of AIDS two years after the last events of the film–as much of the queer community did in the 80s and 90s. But another real-life character goes back to school and eventually becomes a member of Parliament, continuing to serve there today. Although many will insist on calling the film “feel good” the same way they mischaracterized another film based on a true story, The King’s Speech, the real-life events of both films defy the glibness of any marketing label and in the end prove deeper, more complex and more poignant.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsFY0wHpR5o”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

A Director To Watch: Celebrating The Rise of Clio Barnard

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards took place on Sunday night. One of the films nominated for “Best Outstanding British Film” was the critically-acclaimed ‘The Selfish Giant’ (2013). It lost out to the sci-fi juggernaut ‘Gravity’ but it is a powerful, low-budget film that deserves a greater audience. ‘The Selfish Giant’ was, also, the only nominated film in that category written and directed by a woman. The director’s name, of course, is Clio Barnard and my primary aim, this post-BAFTA Tuesday, is to appeal to readers to seek out her films, if you haven’t already done so.

The Selfish Giant (2013) — *The Selfish Giant* (2013)

Written by Rachael Johnson.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards took place on Sunday night. One of the films nominated for “Best Outstanding British Film” was the critically acclaimed The Selfish Giant (2013). It lost out to the sci-fi juggernaut Gravity, but it is a powerful, low-budget film that deserves a greater audience. The Selfish Giant was, also, the only nominated film in that category written and directed by a woman. The director’s name, of course, is Clio Barnard and my primary aim, this post-BAFTA Tuesday, is to appeal to readers to seek out her films, if you haven’t already done so.

The Selfish Giant is a beautifully made film about the friendship between excluded boys on the margins of British society but the director has also made another remarkable film about alienated, disadvantaged women. I’m talking about The Arbor (2010), Barnard’s innovative and involving documentary about the life and career of British playwright Andrea Dunbar. The Arbor was also critically acclaimed. Barnard won Best New Documentary Filmmaker at the Tribeca Film Festival of 2010 as well as a British Independent Film Award.

Andrea Dunbar was a teenaged, working-class literary star and mother of young children from a deprived area of Bradford in West Yorkshire. Her autobiographical plays were produced at The Royal Court Theatre in London in the early 80s. An important cultural voice of underprivileged youth in divided Thatcherite Britain, the playwright died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990 after collapsing in a pub. She was only 29 years old. But the documentary not only tells the story of the dramatist’s extraordinary short life; it also focuses on the tragic fate of her eldest daughter, Lorraine Dunbar. Let’s take a closer look at The Arbor before returning to the current success of The Selfish Giant.

Andrea Dunbar grew up on the run-down Butterworth Estate in Bradford, on a street called Brafferton Arbor. She wrote about the world around her and drew from her own life. Her thematic concerns included intergenerational and interracial relationships, domestic violence, teenage pregnancy, and alcoholism. Dunbar’s play, The Arbor (1980) is about teenage pregnancy while Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982) is about two teenaged girls who are having an affair with the same older, married man. For Dunbar, the role of the writer is to tell the truth about her world. In a featured TV interview, she observes, “Nowadays, people want to face up with what’s actually happening coz it’s actually what’s said. And you write what’s said. You don’t lie. If you’re writing about something that’s actually happening, you’re not going to lie and say it didn’t happen when it did all the time.”

Connor Chapman (Arbor) in The Selfish Giant — Connor Chapman (Arbor) in *The Selfish Giant*

Clips are shown of the film adaptation of Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987) but Barnard adopts a more original approach with The Arbor. The documentary features excerpts of an open-air performance of the play on the same estate today. The Arbor is, in fact, a deeply absorbing and stylistically adventurous documentary. Fiction and fact echo and combine. The film does offer interesting glimpses of the writer, and her family, in archival footage, but what makes it inventive is the sustained use of actors to voice the people who knew Dunbar. Their observations and memories of her are quite perfectly lip-synched and performed. Barnard is intrigued by verbatim theatre where actors speak the words of interviewees. Of particular interest to her was A State Affair, a verbatim play by Robin Soans that revisited Andrea Dunbar’s home in 2000. Barnard states in the production notes of The Arbor that her radical intention to apply verbatim techniques to film is to “make the audience aware they are watching a construct.” This makes for an artistically and intellectually stimulating viewing experience. The distancing effect encourages the viewer to question orthodoxies about documentary filmmaking, particularly questions regarding truth and representation.

Dunbar’s life was eventful and extraordinary. How many writers have been teenaged literary stars and mothers? She did not conform to culturally conservative, working and middle class norms of feminine behavior. She was a right-wing tabloid’s living nightmare: a young working-class mother with three children by three different fathers. Barnard’s approach does not serve to pass any judgment on the writer. Family members and former partners recall Dunbar and their reminiscences and attitudes towards the writer sometimes conflict; Dunbar herself is glimpsed in interviews and comes across as an intense, shy-looking figure. She was, it seems, a complicated character. Lip-synched voices of her family testify to child neglect and hard drinking but it is equally evident that Dunbar was a young woman with deep insecurities. A victim of male exploitation and violence, she spent time in women’s refuges. She, also, most likely suffered from depression and alcoholism.

The Arbor also examines the difficult relationship between Andrea and her biracial daughter, Lorraine. Lorraine’s father was of Pakistani heritage and she observes that her mother’s situation was very unusual on her “all-white, very racist estate.” Virulent racism was commonplace in Yorkshire in the 80s and Lorraine’s memories of the racism she experienced within her own family are disturbing to hear. She even recalls overhearing her own mother- back from the pub- make the sickening, soul-destroying confession to another that she did not love her as much as her other children because of her race. Her relatives, she maintains, also denied her Asian heritage. Lorraine further maintains that her mother was uncaring and unloving in general.

Playwright Andrea Dunbar with Daughter Lorraine — Playwright Andrea Dunbar with daughter Lorraine

Lorraine’s white half-sister, Lisa, disagrees with her characterization of their mother and claims it covers deep hurt over her loss. What is clear is that Lorraine simply unravelled after her mother’s death. Her life was blighted by bullying and drug addiction. She fell into sex work to pay for her habit and, like her mother, became a victim of domestic violence. Lorraine was imprisoned in 2007 for the manslaughter–through neglect–of her two-year-old son who died after ingesting methadone whilst in her care. It perhaps comes as no surprise to learn that she actually preferred prison life.

The Arbor is a unique, evocative portrait of creative talent and inter-generational pain. Both mother and daughter suffered from terrible demons but Barnard’s approach does not offer easy explanations. The young literary star from the streets of Bradford remains a mystery, in many ways, and we are encouraged to ask if we ever really know the truth about someone. The documentary is about an extraordinary woman from a particular place but it deals with the universal theme of family. Are we not all shaped by our families, if not haunted by them? The poet Philip Larkin wrote in This Be The Verse: “They fuck you up, you, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.” Whether you concur with his darkly amusing observation, The Arbor makes you think about what we inherit from our parents. Another theme is the nature of creative talent and I took away from the documentary an acknowledgement that creativity does not always come in clean, little packages. The film also makes the viewer reflect on the impact of poverty, class, and racism on the psyche of human beings.

The Arbor contributes to our understanding of the dramatist in a compelling, original ways. It is an important feminist work too in that it restores to the collective memory the story of a young, disadvantaged female cultural figure while drawing attention to the plight of young girls struggling to survive in societies where racism, lack of opportunity, and masculinist violence are all-pervasive.

In the narrative film, The Selfish Giant, inspired by the Oscar Wilde short story of the same name, Barnard addresses the troubles of two young boys growing up in the same economically deprived area of Bradford. It is, of course, important for female filmmakers to examine masculinity as well as femininity. The Selfish Giant sheds light on both the aggressiveness and vulnerability of boys. Barnard’s lads are lost and disadvantaged. Arbor (Conner Chapman) has a drug-addicted older brother and Swifty (Shaun Thomas) comes from an extremely large, needy family. Both have been excluded from school for discipline problems. Arbor is an angry, insecure lad with ADHD. Swifty is more unassuming. An animal lover, he is a natural with horses. Kicked out of school, the boys resort to scrap metal dealing and get involved in illegal “sulky” (or harness) racing. Arbor feels left out when Swifty is chosen to be the sulky rider of a scrap metal dealer called Kitten (Sean Gilder). He also steals from him. Punishment is a risky but potentially profitable mission that ends in tragedy.

The Boys of The Selfish Giant — The boys of *The Selfish Giant*

The Selfish Giant highlights the exploitation of children by adults but it is also a sensitive study of male friendship. Arbor can be belligerent but he can also be engaging, even affectionate. He loves his friend and the friendship moves the viewer because we realize that it is his only authentic relationship. Barnard understands that his bravado masks raw sensitivity. Arbor’s home, for Swifty, is a refuge from the insecurity and turmoil of his family life. Chapman and Thomas, it must be said, deliver persuasive, natural performances as the boys.

The Selfish Giant is a hard-hitting, sometimes harrowing, film. Of course, there are those who would charge Barnard with exploiting poverty as well as giving a too depressing picture of the lives of poor people in the UK. I would not, however, accuse the director of being a class tourist. Although the daughter of a university lecturer, she grew up in West Yorkshire and knows the area in question well. The Selfish Giant is not manipulative. It engages you emotionally but it is not sentimental. In fact, it grows more powerful and beautiful as the story unfolds. Stylistically, The Selfish Giant is a social realist tale with a modern, picaresque feel. The spiritual themes of Wilde’s story also become more apparent as the film develops. Barnard’s formidable sense of place is, again, manifest. The Selfish Giant’s post-industrial, semi-rural landscape is shot with skill and imagination. This world does not lack poetry but Barnard endows it with an austere power. In short, The Selfish Giant is a beautifully made film that that needed to be made, and needs to be seen. It critical successes–BAFTA nomination and Europa Cinemas prize at Cannes in 2013–are richly deserved.

Sulky Harness Racing (The Selfish Giant) — Sulky harness racing (*The Selfish Giant*)

Clio Barnard is not frightened of tackling tough subjects. She is concerned with the marginalized and the forgotten–untutored children, abused women, anguished addicts and wayward, natural-born artists. Both films explore the alienation of the English underclass and working class. They are not directly political but it is clear where the director’s ideological sympathies lie. The films show what poverty does to people psychologically. This is, in fact, what they are ultimately about. There is a sureness and artistry in Barnard’s directing and her work has been both aesthetically striking and intellectually engaging. Stylistically, her films so far have revealed experimental daring as well as strong social commitment. I hope she goes on to make many more beautiful, thought-provoking films. Let’s celebrate her rise.