Ubiquitous closed circuit television cameras in Great
Britain’s public spaces may have put a light in the all-seeing eye of George
Orwell’s Big Brother, but what that eye beholdeth depends on who does the
looking.
One sees this in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. A temporarily
incapacitated newspaper photographer not used to sitting still is forced in his
boredom to watch his neighbors’ daily activities from his armchair through a
telephoto lens. How much of what he sees does he really know and understand?
And to what extent are his observations only pet theories or voyeuristic fancies
about the things he imagines that he saw taking place, colored by the biases of
his personal frame of reference at the time he happened to be looking?
Jackie Morrison (Kate Vickie), the protagonist
of Red Road, watches the city of
Glasgow as a closed circuit television surveillance technician for the police
department. Like the photographer in Rear Window, we see her
sympathetically follow the daily dramas of those she sees regularly sitting at
a bank of 28 television monitors fed by a citywide network of closed circuit
surveillance cameras. There is a middle-aged man who walks an ill old dog, and
a young woman who cleans offices, among others. She also keeps an eye on women
alone on the streets at night.
But Jackie herself is a cipher. Her work is her life,
and when she is off work, she seems to watch rather than live life. She wears a
gold wedding band, but appears to live by herself; she has a sex date in the
cab of a parked truck every two weeks with a married work acquaintance. She is
in touch with her in-laws, has a strained relationship with her father-in-law,
and there is the briefest hint of a ‘they’ not having been buried.
So Jackie may be a widow. She also occasionally goes
to places she sees on her monitors at work: she leaves her sister-in-law’s
wedding reception to go to the where the man walks the old dog and stands next
to them to see the notices he is reading on the inside of a shop window that
her camera can’t see.
At work, Jackie sees a man follow a woman into a
vacant lot. She alerts a police patrol, and then cancels the alert when she
sees that they just are having consensual sex. She keeps watching them and
recognizes the man—Clyde Henderson (Tony Curran). She has a clipping at home which
reports that this man got a 10-year criminal sentence. Her solicitor tells her
that Henderson ‘got an early release for good behavior… he’ll be back like a
shot if he messes up.’
Our thriller is in motion. With no narrative exposition
as to why, the audience participates in Jackie's voyeurism as she starts
following Henderson's activities obsessively at work. In the grip of her
obsession, she misses a young girl’s stabbing. And then she seeks Henderson out
where he lives, out the Red Road of the title, into a series of eight
graffiti-painted and trash-blown high rise public housing projects.
Jackie crosses the line professionally, but she also
may be risking her life in seeking out a male ex-felon in whose serious offense
she apparently had a personal stake, and with no more than a rock in her
pocket. But the way the story plays out, these are risks she must take to cross
the line back from being a voyeur to reengaging in her life.
A small but crucial moment comes in what seems like a
pause in the narration. Jackie, leaning against a wall inside Henderson’s
apartment, catches herself listening to an intimate conversation between a
couple around the corner, watching them in their reflection on a window. One of
the couple, a young woman with whom Jackie is briefly acquainted, gets up
suddenly and comes face to face with Jackie, who as though sees this woman with
new eyes.
In a sense, director Andrea Arnold dekes us into
sharing her narrator’s personal assumptions and judgments, then shows us how
wrong both her narrator and we are by having not looked closely enough to
appreciate them for what they are in themselves, rather than as we might have
them.
Watch carefully, because Arnold tells her story in
pictures; this seems fitting for a culture that does not seem to use many words
to communicate things. The dialogue is broguish, but light and not difficult to
follow—there are subtitles if you think you are missing anything.
In case you are squeamish or watch with children,
there is graphic sex and highly colorful language in the telling of this tale.
The British underclass appears to employ the word ‘cunt’ in a sense similar to
that in which a certain African-American element freely uses the notorious
‘n-word’ (for instance, Henderson’s mate Stevie (Martin Compston) refers to the
strawberry blond Henderson warmly as a ‘ginger cunt’), though the subtitles
leave a lot of these out.
Movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSfy6UpAXKQ&feature=related
Read MP’s reviews of two more Andrea Arnold films:
Wasp 2003, Andrea
Arnold's Oscar-winning 26-minute short film, does everything a feature
does, but in 26 minutes. I don’t think there’s a single wasted frame in this
film.
Fish Tank 2009, a
coming-of-age story about a hip hop Victorian novel heroine who wants to float
like a butterfly and sting like a bee.
Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdD7PQPQa08&NR=1&feature=fvwp
OK, so I saw this movie last night and was underwhelmed. In many ways, your review of it was better than the movie itself.... you seemed to reap more from the film than the film sowed. In short, I don't think the director did "tell her story in pictures" effectively enough.
ReplyDeleteI spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out just what the heck was going on. When things did become clear toward the very end, I had a vague sense of "so what?" and wondered if this person really would have done what she did based on what I knew about her from the story told.
Sorry, Artie.... this one didn't do it for me.