Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Review: Red Road
Red Road is the feature debut of British director Andrea Arnold, who accepted an Oscar for her short film Wasp by saying winning was 'the dog's bollocks' (which is good). She has followed it up with a film about a CCTV camera operator in Glasgow, watching the streets for crime. It's just won a bunch of Scottish Baftas and, comments about exactly how stiff the opposition could be aside, deserved them.
What's most interesting about the film is to compare it to how an American film would handle the subject. The operator is a very closed off woman, lonely and showing signs of not having dealt with a very traumatic moment in her past. She still wears a wedding ring despite being obviously without a husband. One day she sees a man on one of her monitors who she thought was still in prison. She checks the image against newspaper clippings she keeps in her house, strongly suggesting that he is responsible for that traumatic incident. She then becomes increasingly obsessed with him, to the point of ignoring the duties of her job and the film follows her increasingly extreme actions though, importantly, never telling us what this incident actually was that obviously drives them.
An American film, I think, would lay on the paranoid thriller elements. It would play up the voyeuristic, not to mention the technological, aspects of the surveillance and the obsessive aspects of the character. It would also make the dark and dirty streets of the city far more nightmarish. As it is, this film, from it's first moments, plays up the very human aspects of this situation, with her following the ongoing health problems of a local dog with a empathetic care. Her job, rather than being a big brother, is just to try and help people in trouble, as much as can be done.
The CCTV elements, which feature heavily in the mostly wordless first third, serve to contextualise the world, so giving us a relationship to it when she starts moving through the streets for real. Thankfully any heavy handed symbolism about her dislocation or separation from life is underplayed and they mostly play as a framing device and as a depiction of the routines of a very sad woman, not really living her own life.
This more human approach is representative of the film's intelligence, rather than clever-cleverness or intellectualism, and the film is more light of touch than it first appears. Her obsession leads her to the monolithic tower blocks of Red Road where this newly released criminal lives, to spy on him and, eventually to enter his life, and these scenes are played to create a fear of this possibly violent man and this extremely rough and run-down area.
These scenes are certainly tense, but I had a let-down feeling where I thought that this is what the film was finally about - the terror of an ordinary woman vulnerable in a dangerous world of criminals. Gone was the humanity, to be replaced with a very grimy, realist horror story.
Thankfully it turns out this was exactly what the film wanted you to think. It was playing on the middle-class, suburban and educated (the sorts of people who, tragically, are the ones most likely to watch this sort of film) fears of those living on the very edges of society. The film then shifts almost imperceptibly in tone, shading all of these characters to give a much less black and white view of the situation. And this is not done with a big shocking twist or revelation, but only with the subtlest of changes of point of view. The film has no exposition, little dialogue, and very few moments of great incident, so the the shift is done only by a slow accumulation of history and by behaviour. It is excellently done.
The last forty minutes are amazingly compelling and ultimately very satisfying. The tears and explanations that finally come are completely earned. The problem is that the lack of exposition in the first two thirds (we follow the woman, but have no idea why she is doing the things she is doing) makes that middle section incredibly annoying. It is too long to keep an audience waiting for some explanation, especially when you are misleading them slightly in tone. The overall structure is great to look back on, but it is really annoying to sit through.
Another, albeit slight, problem is that, as we are simply following the behaviour of a very depressed woman, the film can come over as a little glum. Too many film-makers (and artists are a moody fucking bunch at the best of times) often mistake depictions of depression with simply making a depressing film.
The film looks excellent, though the grotty areas it is shot in obviously effect its 'slickness', it is edited well, acted naturally and convincingly and the locations sound accurate too. Estate pubs do sound slightly echoey and uninviting - they get this right, even if it is not all that pleasant a sound environment to be in.
What I was wondering was whether it would have any cross-over potential. The advertising over herr did emphasise the thriller and mystery aspects of the film. The answer is a resounding no. This is an 'arthouse' film through and through and absolutely a small scale character study. It is slow, lacking in obvious incident and concerned with behaviour rather than plot. Trainspotting this is not. For all that, if these are the sorts of films you go to, this really is an excellent example.
8 whiskeys out of 10
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