The second festival of new British cinema, although it fully coincided with the program of the spring week of British film in Moscow, displayed all the optimistic signs of cultural exchange. A good downtown theater, reasonable ticket prices, the arrival of a film director and his lively contacts with the audience and media, along with the introductory speeches of Kyiv’s British Council executives all set the proper tone to this function and made one think that cinema is just a pleasing accompaniment to the smooth chorus of British-Ukrainian friendship.
That the festival was organized so well was the best possible gesture of respect for the ordinary viewer. But a critic does not feel so serene in this situation because this leaves unanswered the question that arose a year ago at the first festival: does the British cinema exist at all as an individual phenomenon or a school? It would be too self-confident to search for the answer only on the basis of a small portion of British movie exports. Still, there is some food for thought.
It was obvious from the very beginning that the films presented featured, to put it roughly, two genres. The first is youth-oriented, cult movies. They are spin-offs of such mid-1990s sensations, as Trainspotting or Run Lola Run. This is as a rule easily recognizable material. Such films show a footloose company of young people hanging around the city and trying to solve their bothersome problems. Naturally, there are much music and drugs, close-ups, and off-screen monologues, but all this as a whole manifests the MTV esthetics of Generation X. The second trend dates back to the traditional English psychological theater. Family drama seems to remain for British film directors something of sacred cow. At any rate, slow pictures set within the four walls and rife with dialogues and the dull atmosphere of discord and misunderstanding have become almost a symbol of the British cinema as such. Although the organizers tried to minimize the presence of this tradition, it still happened one way or another in most of the films either in terms of the plot or esthetics.
The motley discotheque South West Nine and Human Traffic, in spite of all attempts to display the characters’ reflections on current events, surely remained of the kind they were conceived, upbeat oddball films. The former is crammed full of the exotics of today’s London or, to be more exact, Brixton, one of the city’s most special boroughs. This film is crawling with metropolitan anarchists, Jamaican drug dealers, and a host of other eccentrics. There is no intelligible plot or clearly expressed leitmotif but there are too many wide-open narcotic “doors of perception.” Briefly, South West Nine as well as Human Traffic, remains a sketch on “the way we live.” They live, by all accounts, not so dull, although they are not exactly engaged in doing anything creative. Yet, I have no special complaints about these movies: they are kind of musical-cum-psychedelic trivia. If made eight years or so ago, they would have created a furor, but now they are run- of-the-mill representatives of the UK mainstream cinema.
Saul Metzstein shows a more ingenious treatment of the topic in Late Night Shopping. Also featuring a company of the young and the shiftless, this movie is still free of clubs, the banging of DJ’s drums, elephantine doses of LSD and other such “good stuff.” Four almost accidental acquaintances first create personal difficulties for themselves simply because they have nothing else to do and then overcome them by a concerted and frantic effort. This even looks funny at times, especially if we bear in mind that actors turn in at least good performances even in the most mediocre British films. The most interesting thing is the happy ending. The same optimism runs through Born Romantic directed by David Kane. Here too we see a group of chance friends. But, in this case, the hangout is not a cafe but a disco bar where they learn to dance salsa. Affairs are begun and hearts broken to the hot rhythm, but everything turns out fine in the end. This witty, somewhat erotic, and light film could be a prime time attraction on any television channel.
The totally different East Is East and The Claim could be referred, with a certain reservation, to the “family genre.” East... features an unusual, Anglo- Pakistani, family. Fortunately, director Damien O’Donnel is tactful enough to allow the conflicts that crop up between the pater familias , a traditional Muslim, and his young westernized sons to be settled in a comic vein. As to The Claim, it was made by well- known Michael Winterbottom. However, this time the director took the risk of filming an epic saga about the 1840s gold rush. In spite of the superb location scenes and the excellent cast, including such stars as Nastassja Kinski and Milla Jovovich, it is difficult to say The Claim is a success for Winterbottom. The movie appears slow and at times simply dull. There seems to be no alternative to the characters’ all-embracing seriousness, sufferings, and monumentality, with perpetual winter all around.
The definition “interesting drama” is more applicable to Sexy Beast directed by Jonathan Glazer and My Brother Tom directed by Dom Rotheroe. The former begins like a gangster movie, then turns into a brilliant psychological confrontation between two powerful characters played by the superb Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, and, paradoxically enough, still remains a “very British” movie.
Rotheroe’s film is a different story. This is the festival’s only movie that lays serious claim to a new cinematic language and picture play in the spirit of the much advertised Dogma-95. With a bounding camera (the director of photography is Rob Mueller who worked with Dogma-95 director Lars von Trier as well as with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmush) and neurotic heroes, the film looked like a revelation against the overall backdrop of static British cinema. Moreover, the screenplay is also an attempt to make a breakthrough. The film’s first third is a fast-paced, sometimes frightening, story of the revolt of two young people against the suffocating, violence- laden atmosphere that reigns in their town. Tom and Jessica form a tiny wild tribe in a thick forest, with their rituals becoming more and more mindless and uncontrolled every time they meet. However, the director lacked either the spirit or the inspiration to further unfold the line of irrational rebellion against the grownup world. In the end, Rotheroe slips to a rather hackneyed love story spiced with melodrama. There is not even a trace of the glaring explosion of passions or leap of faith typical of the best Dogma-type films. All we have to do is pull out our handkerchiefs and dry our tears.
I will hazard the suggestion that in the latter case the blame should be put not so much on the director as on British cinema as a whole. For years and decades, it has been searching for a theme of its own, an interrupted source of conflict-generating energy of its own, with no apparent success. Neither drugs (a fully exhausted subject), nor the personal vs. public opposition (the French theme), nor the outbursts of highly romantic personalities (the German theme) have become a powerful factor to raise any new wave on United Kingdom screens. All we can do is wait.
And perhaps expect something? This has also already been done.
