| BALTIC EXCHANGES : 3rd report from Tallinn ('Mindless'; 'Red Road') |
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| Friday, 08 December 2006 | |
 seen Friday 8th December: MINDLESS [5/10 TV] : Meeletu : Estonia 2006 : Elmo NUGANEN : 90m Though it's obtaining theatrical exposure via certain film-festivals, Mindless is rather better suited to the small screen for which it was made. A promising idea stretched out somewhat awkwardly to feature length - the tone veering uncertainly between comedy and drama along the way - it's the story of Tom (Rain Simmul), a self-made thirtysomething Estonian millionaire who tires of the rat-race and moves to a remote rural shack. He quickly becomes a figure of considerable interest among his new neighbours, and responds by turning into a kind of new-agey messiah figure: he sees himself as a 'messenger' leading 'his people' towards enlightenment, and, in accordance with his quasi-priestly function, develops an increasingly ascetic lifestyle. But things don't work out quite as Tom hopes... Mindless is based on a well-regarded play by Jaan Tatte, and in adapting the material for the screen writer-director Nuganen retains a stagey, somewhat artifical feel in many of the scenes, especially those which consist of Tom in a dialogue with the various visitors to his inaccesible retreat. Tom's first interactions with his rural neighbours intriguingly subvert our expectations: rather than the city-slicker absorbing wisdom from those conducting the 'simple life,' the flow of knowledge actually runs the other way. Or so it seems: in fact, the 'yokels' prove rather more astute than their new-found 'leader,' with the result that this is yet another film whose underlying message is that the countryside is a hazardous place for educated, sophisticated 'outsiders.' It's a lesson Tom learns the hard way - indeed, it's rather implausible that such a successful businessman would act in such a blinkered manner. Or are we to take it that the effect of solitude and peace is to unhinge Tom`s mental equilibrium? His behaviour does become increasingly off-kilter, to the point that both character and film end up trying the viewer`s patience. The pay-off of Tom`s bucolic messiah 'trip' is quite a neat one - unfortunate, then, that the film ends as it began, with Tom in court explaining why he deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail. This framing-story is rather silly and superfluous - likewise a larkish, misleadingly humorous prologue tracing Tom's rebellious non-conformism through school and college. Another, more general minus is the muzak-ish score, which seems to belong to a more light-hearted movie altogether and provides further unwelcome reminders of the project`s TV roots. RED ROAD [4/10] : UK/Denmark 2006 : Andrea ARNOLD : 117m Glasgow, the present day: the city is under surveillance from hundreds of CCTV cameras designed to catch criminals in the act and provide taped evidence of their misdeeds. Among the staff privately employed to monitor the cameras' output is Jackie (Kate Dickie), a quietly-spoken woman in her thirties. She's a conscientious worker - until the moment she spots a familiar face on her bank of monitors. This leads her into an obsessive quest - and violent consequences both physical and emotional... Though it's been almost uniformly hailed as one of the most striking and accomplished British feature debuts of 2006, writer-director Arnold's Red Road turns out to have an unexpected amount in common with one of the very ropiest of this year's UK releases: Penny Woolcock's Mischief Night (in many of its themes, it's also particularly reminiscent of another recent misfire by a female British director, namely Juliet McKoen's Frozen.) As it happens, both Red Road and Mischief Night were shot by Robbie Ryan, whose cinematography is one of the most consistently impressive elements of Red Road: a film which (despite the quotidian grubbiness of many of its settings) is great to look at, awkward to listen to, and decidedly troubling to ponder. To explain the specifics would involve giving away the ending: suffice it to say that the more you think about the plot (once it's finally been revealed in its entirety) the more implausible and, indeed, morally objectionable it seems. Like the Leeds-based Mischief Night, Red Road is shot and set in a particularly deprived corner of a major British city: in this case one of the more poverty-stricken areas of Glasgow. One of the principal locations is the real-life Red Road flats, which give the film that evocative (if ultimately somewhat meaningless) title. And, given what unfolds here, Arnold should perhaps have come up with a fictional name for the area. Like Mischief Night, Red Road purports to present an accurate image of real urban lives in the first decade of the 20th century: the main difference being that Mischief Night is (mostly) played for larkish laughs, whereas Red Road is a determinedly downbeat affair whose principal characters are crushed by grief and guilt. What the two films unfortunately share is the slight but nagging air of phoniness that plagues their dialogue and undermines their claims to accuracy. Simply put, the characters in these two films quite often don't talk like real people, they talk in a manner which the scriptwriter seems to think people in these circumstances might talk: it's probably no coincidence Woolcock's personal background is (quite literally) half a world away from inner-city Leeds; that Arnold didn't know Glasgow before she went there to make her movie. And it isn't just what the characters say that comes across as unconvincing here: it's also what they do: Red Road carries with it a distinct whiff of patronising exploitation in its presentation of a haplessly lumpen, undereducated, inarticulate underclass, here presented in an uniformly stygian set of flats, pubs and litter-strewn streets. In one particularly unlikely touch, a young 'cockney sparrer' (played by My Summer of Love's Natalie Press) feeds her dog by spooning the meaty chunks directly on to the kitchen floor. Just as such details smack of scriptwriting contrivance, Red Road falls down in its general tackling of major themes. The proliferation of surveillance cameras in modern Britain is a ripe subject for such a drama - but here it turns out to be no more than an opportunisticaly topical, Orwellian-dystopian backdrop for the main story. Jackie seems to do nothing at work but follow one particular individual around - and does so without any comment or interference from her employers, even when her fixation on this particular person means she fails to capture the identity of other culprits and suspects. If the intention is to indict Britain's surveillance culture, the film succeeds all too well: according to Red Road, such systems are worryingly prone to serious abuse. But this particularly disturbing implication is skipped over with barely a thought: Arnold is much more interested in developing what turns out to be a wildly elaborate revenge-scheme for Jackie, a character whose emotional turmoil seems designed to persuade us into sympathising with her version of vigilante justice. The film turns out, however, to lack even the courage of its own (dubious) convictions, opting instead for an ironic, somewhat surprisingly optimistic finale in which Jackie undergoes an unsatisfactorily abrupt volte-face. Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised by Red Road's deficiencies: the last major Scottish-Danish co-production was the similarly shoddy, phoney-sounding Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself, while this film is is the first part a conceptual trilogy dreamed up in the over-fertile mind of Lars Von Trier. We can look forward to two more films, featuring many of the same characters and actors, all of them set in Scotland and adhering to a pre-determined set of Dogme-ish rules. All three films are to be made by first-time writer-directors: fingers crossed one of the remaining pair will warrant the praise that's been so misguidedly lavished on Arnold's disappointing effort. Neil Young nb : all timings are from film-festival catalogue. Mindless seen at Kinomaja (press show); Red Road at Teater No99 (public show; complimentary ticket). |
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