BLUE BLACK PERMANENT

5/10

UK 1992 : Margaret TAIT : 84 mins

Overrated sole feature from Tait, a 74-year-old Orcadian highly praised for the many poetic short films she'd directed over the preceding decades. In modern-day Edinburgh, photographer Barbara (Celia Imrie) ponders the fate of her mother Greta (Gerda Stevenson), who drowned in mysterious circumstances during Barbara's childhood. In flashback, we see episodes from the months leading up to Greta's death: an aspiring poet, she'd struggled to reconcile her creative urges with the mundane aspects of family life in austere post-war Scotland. By the end neither we nor Barbara are very much the wiser: did Greta commit suicide? Or did she sleepwalk to her watery demise?

Blue Black Permanent has its moments - there are some nice scenes when Greta visits her crotchety old father back in Orkney - on the whole it doesn't do much to justify its lofty reputation. Barely a decade after first release the film has already dated conspicuously badly, with a directorial style is so stiff and deliberate you'd be forgiven for presuming it was made in 1982, or even 1972. The 'modern day' sequences are especially fumbling and pretentious, with some brief and very ill-advised "fantasy" sequences which look laughable on what's clearly a shoestring budget.

But there's no excuse for the duff performance Tait somehow manages to coax out of Imrie, who's usually such a terrific performer: while we see Barbara at work, we never for a moment believe she's is a professional photographer. Poor Jack Shepherd, meanwhile, is even less well-served in the thankless role of Philip, her boyfriend-cum-sounding-board.

Stevenson fares better, working very hard in the impossible role of Greta, but she's stuck inside Tait's trite, romantic, sentimental, rather reactionary view of the Artist as gently-tortured martyr. Free-spirit Greta is much given to soulful walks in the pouring rain, scribbling down her impressions in a notebook as she goes. It's surprising that in late-50s Scotland she has a pen which works in such conditions. Perhaps this is the "blue black permanent" ink to which the title refers, though (this being an Art Film, it's never actually mentioned or explained in the film itself.)

A more serious problem is that Tait - frustratingly - never bothers to let us know whether Greta actually had any talent: there are no extracts from any of the poems which, we're told, obtained newspaper publication. As Morrissey put it in The Smiths' song Miserable Lie, "She could have been a poet - or she could have been a fool..."

10th September, 2004
(seen 28th August : FilmHouse Edinburgh : public show - Edinburgh Film Festival)

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by Neil Young

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