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stevebalshaw
Reviews
Diary of a Bad Lad (2010)
"We can do anything we like - you signed a release!"
Every Danny Dyer fan should see this film. And so should he.
For those who don't know, Danny Dyer is an actor has built an inexplicably successful career playing geezerish mockney gangsters and football hooligans. He also presents "Danny Dyer's Deadliest Men", a morally-questionable piece of reality TV in which he pals around with various low-level gangsters, celebrating their violent actions. Recently, Dyer made the sort of viciously misogynous "joke" one of the characters in his films, or one of his new gangster pals would make in a cheap lads' mag renowned for its Neanderthal attitude to women, and sparked a national outcry. Dyer very quickly backtracked, claiming to have been misquoted, expressing bewilderment as to how such a misunderstanding might have occurred. This is what happens to people who hang around with gangsters and criminals: they lose their distance, their objectivity; they become trapped in situations they did not initiate. Their laddish power fantasies turn nasty; spiral totally out of control.
I found myself thinking of Danny Dyer and his fans a lot while I was watching DIARY OF A BAD LAD, Pleased Sheep Productions' ferociously intelligent study of the media's obsession with, and complicity in, modern criminality.
The story is a simple one, a morality play for the modern age. Disgraced film lecturer and would-be documentary filmmaker Barry Lick has a project he believes will be the making of him: a no-holds barred documentary investigation into the alleged criminal activities of a dodgy local businessman who for legal reasons he can only identify as "Ray Topham". Recruiting a team of his own former students, Barry's quest leads him to "Topham's" "Security Consultant", Tommy Morghen, who offers all of the access the filmmakers could wish for. But Tommy is a smarter player than Barry and his callow crew could possibly imagine, and is exploiting them for his own ruthless ends
What gives Bad Lad its unique edge is its approach, the dextrous way in which it blurs the boundaries between the real and the reconstructed. An object lesson in low budget film-making; in making the best of use of available facilities; the film is shot entirely in grainy TV-documentary style, with scenes actually cut together from much longer in-character interviews and fly-on-the-wall sequences. Dialogue is a mixture of tight scripting and controlled improvisation. The cast is a carefully selected mixture of professional actors and "real" people. The filmmakers play fictional versions of themselves - young filmmakers just out of university, enlisted by their former tutor for a project that all of them see as a ticket to that much-coveted media job. Writer / Producer / Star Jonathan Williams really is a former film tutor, and director Michael Booth was one of his students. Various shady local "characters", such as Nicky Lockett (MC Tunes) appear as "themselves". This intricately-constructed quasi-reality really allows the actors to shine. All are on peak form. Joe O'Byrne delivers a mesmerising performance as the charming, terrifying sociopath Tommy Morghen, Donna Henry is a brittle mixture of defiance and vulnerability as exploited drug courier and porn starlet Joanne, and there are stand-out tragi-comic supporting turns from Clyve Bonnelle as an ill-fated junkie and James Foster as one of Tommy's more hapless victims.
The result is one of the most plausible and convincing faux-documentaries ever made. So authentic is the film's recreation of the modern documentary style, and so credible its performances and depiction of Northern Gangland, that when lead actor Joe O'Byrne appeared in character as the gangster Tommy Morghen to introduce a screening at the BBC in London, somebody actually called security. But such attention to detail is only half the story. What gives the film its teeth is the extraordinary, multi-layered script, which is able to slide effortlessly from wince-inducing comedy of embarrassment into bone-chilling cruelty and violence and back again, and which boils with rage at our gangster-fixated, morally empty Reality-TV-dominated freak-show culture. The real monster in the film is not Tommy Morghen, it is the increasingly deranged and self-justifying filmmaker, Barry Lick, who tells one traumatized documentary subject, with an almost Satanic relish: "We can do anything we like - you signed a release!"
With such an attitude, Barry's future in TV would seem guaranteed. The only problem is, he signed a contract of his own
Splintered (2010)
A Grim and Freudian Fairytale
Horror Cinema is not the same as social realism. It deals generally with the unreal, the fantastic; more often than not it eschews naturalism in favour of a more heightened, stylised approach. This does not, however, mean that Horror Cinema lacks socio-political awareness; that it does not often confront serious issue in a serious fashion. But the key word here is "confront".
I found myself thinking about this fact as I read the other IMDb reactions to SPLINTERED, and in particular the objections to its allegedly "crass" treatment of the very serious issue of child abuse and its repercussions. Given the fact that SPLINTERED is first and foremost a horror film, not an issue-led social drama, I think the film's approach is entirely responsible and legitimate.
SPLINTERED takes the traditional tropes of the teens-in-peril slasher movie and filters them through the dark, Freudian fairy tales of Angela Carter, to powerful effect. It is the story of Sophie, haunted since childhood by dreams of being attacked by some bestial entity. The film begins with this recurring nightmare, then fast-forwards to the present, where Sophie is headed to the countryside to investigate news reports of a sheep-killing wild animal. With her are best friend, Jane, Jane's geeky brother Dean, Jane's boorish boyfriend Sam, and alpha male John, who clearly has designs on Sophie. The film establishes quickly and efficiently that Sophie is a troubled young woman, isolated even among her friends, who regard her obsession with the Unexplained as a self-dramatising affectation, rather than a method of coping with her own night terrors. This particular case has taken an unusually strong hold on Sophie's imagination and has even begun to affect the shape of her nightmares, as a second waking dream makes startlingly clear. Her subconscious is screaming at her - if she can solve this mystery, then she will finally be able to confront her own.
Sophie, then, is established as the dream-driven questing heroine of Fairytale, whose journey, though fraught with grave risks will ultimately be one of personal enlightenment. But this is a particularly grim fairy tale. Sophie's dream offers her a vision, an intimation of her own future, of the terrors and losses she will face. Her enlightenment will not come cheap, and it may not be something she wants to accept.
The friends establish a camp in the woods, and the various tensions in the group start to surface. All of these relate in some way to Sophie. Significantly much of the tension is romantic or sexual in nature, or expresses itself in such terms. Sam resents Sophie's continued hold over Jane, who still refers to Sophie as her "soul-mate", usually a term reserved for a romantic partner. Shy Dean has a hopeless crush on his sister's friend. John thinks he has more chance of success with her, but only if she'll abandon her obsession with the Unknown. Both John and in particular Sam become increasingly hostile to Sophie, deriding her as "a virgin" whose obsession is actually a means of evading emotional and sexual contact. They do not realise just how right they are.
The tensions drive Sophie away from the others, though John follows, thinking to "comfort" her. Here, in the heart of the woods, they discover the Seminary.
And at this point, Sophie's nightmares begin to take on all-too-physical form. John is attacked and killed by something bestial. Sophie is knocked unconscious, and awakes to find herself trapped in a cell-like room, very like the one in her dreams. Her captor is the wretched, barely coherent Gavin. Initially, he seems a threat: the ogre in the castle, the Beast to Sophie's Beauty. He is clearly besotted with her, but he is equally clearly disturbed, and possibly dangerous. He talks of "protecting" Sophie, suggesting that there is something else in the Seminary that will harm her. The situation has unsettling echoes for Sophie. And little by little the dreams that haunt her start to coalesce into something else as long-repressed memories struggle to surface.
Escaping from her cell, Sophie discovers that Gavin really is trying to protect her - from Vincent, his insane, utterly feral brother. She uncovers the two brothers' story: a horrible tale of systematic abuse that has left Gavin a half-insane emotional wreck, and has reduced Vincent to little more than a wild animal. And now Vincent is loose, a ravening id-creature, filled with unfocused rage and bottomless hunger, destroying everything and everyone in his path.
Sophie flees, with Vincent in pursuit, bringing violent death to those around her. Finally, she finds herself back in the woods, alone, all of her friends dead and gone, her nightmare finally coming true. And at that moment, everything she has been repressing erupts to the surface. She sees the real beast, the one who has haunted her and hunted her since childhood: the father who abused her. She understands what she has held buried in her subconscious for so long., and she lashes out, fights back for the first time in her life, annihilating Vincent; utterly feral herself in that moment, as she howls out in rage and pain the terrible truth she must suddenly confront: "I'm not a virgin, I'M NOT A VIRGIN!" It's a devastating moment. Confrontational, certainly, deeply upsetting, yes, but by no means crass or exploitative, because it is grounded so carefully in emotional reality. There is no such thing as closure. The truth is often painful, and catharsis is always violent. It may lead to release, to a cure for one's ills, or it may prove utterly destructive. As the film abandons a bloodied and battered Sophie to her fate, traumatised both by what has happened to her, and what she has discovered about herself as a result, we are left with little hope that she faces a happy future. She has finally confronted the truth about her life. Now she must live with it.
A Boy Called Dad (2009)
British social realism with an elliptical and poetic European sensibility
British TV drama, shaped by the demands of the half-hour soap opera, is simultaneously tawdry and melodramatic. It is a place in which underdeveloped, stereotypical characters stumble their way through repetitive, overcooked story lines, and indulge on an almost weekly basis in overacted, breast-beating histrionics. This is drama boiled right down to a series of clashes and confrontations, a chain of Big Dramatic Scenes, with no space between them. There is never any sense of the day-to-day, normal lives of characters, the moments when they are not caught up in the middle of some major event, trauma, or emotional upheaval.
A BOY CALLED DAD takes a similarly heightened approach to narrative, but the effect is worlds away from the cheap sensationalism of early evening soap opera. True, considered in isolation, the film's plot various plot elements might seem as melodramatic as those of any issue-led soap: a fourteen-year-old boy, Robbie, impregnates a class-mate, who rejects him in favour of a petty hoodlum, who ill-treats the child: by an improbably coincidence, the boy is reunited with his own estranged father, an affable but unreliable wastrel, who eventually lets him down; a confrontation with the hoodlum boyfriend of his classmate results in the boy shooting the hoodlum and absconding with the baby; on the run, he finds himself in Wales, where he befriends a young woman who has been traumatised by childhood sexual abuse. The film might thus seem like a chain of improbable incidents and actions which exist solely to set up the scenario through which certain issues may be explored.
But to offer such a bare synopsis is to ignore director Brian Percival's approach to such generic-seeming material. Opting for a lyrical, elliptical style, influenced as much by European filmmakers such as Bresson or the Dardenne Brothers, as by the usual suspects of British Social realism, Percival minimises melodrama in favour of something rather more meditative. This is a lean, spare film, which focuses on location as much as it does on character; offsetting tense, twitchy hand-held close-ups of the characters' faces with smooth, tracking long shots as they move through the film's varying urban and rural landscapes. The effect is both to anchor the drama in a wider world, and also to provide sufficient space and quiet time to offset the story's noisier dramatic flourishes, which are themselves often consciously underplayed. The film often presents its key moments of confrontation and revelation partially off screen, or in silence, focusing on face and body language rather than resorting to the habitual expository, explanatory dialogue and mannered shouting of British TV drama. Performances are low-key and naturalistic, and Kyle Ward is remarkable, both in his scenes with the always excellent Ian Hart, and also in those with the baby, which convey all of the anxieties and joys of fatherhood.
Sure, there are flaws, where the British inclination for melodrama and soap operatics threaten to take hold. The moment in which the hoodlum boyfriend, little more than a cockney accented cipher from a Danny Dyer flick, produces a gun to see off the 13 year old protagonist is faintly absurd. A knife would have been sufficient and more plausible in the circumstances. The entire mid section, in which the protagonist finds himself on a farm in Wales and befriends a lonely, troubled young woman could easily be viewed as a digression; a misjudged homage to WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND, which also finds time to deal with that currently most over-used of dramatic clichés, child abuse. But it could equally be argued that the whole film is actually about the iniquities of parents upon their children; the damage wrought by cruelty, neglect, or denial. Here it is not the girl's father who is the abuser but her father's brother - and the estrangement that exists between father and daughter is due to the fact that neither has been able to deal with the fact. This is ultimately a film which shows parents and children trying to cope with the consequences of their actions, to face up to truths they have tried to bury, and to rebuild their relationships. Narratively, the sequence might seem digressive, but thematically it is right on target, and it moves the protagonist forward on his journey to responsibility. The final emotional confrontation between father and son has its origins in the shouty moments of confrontation and closure that characterise soap opera, but the scene must be offset against the understated way in which we discover the cruel irony that Robbie's memory of the last good holiday he had with his parents is actually the moment his parents split up. And the final confrontation itself unleashes not a tirade of recrimination from Robbie against his all-too-fallible father, merely the weary exhortation to "do something".
All in all, this is a visually striking and emotionally powerful little film, filled with wry humour, pathos, and genuine tenderness. Its faults may be attributed perhaps to growing pains, as it attempts to shift British cinema away from the soap operatic take on social realism that characterises most attempts at "serious" film drama in the UK, and reaches towards something quieter, more contemplative, less prescriptive in the impressions it wishes to create in the audience. A bold move in the right direction.