British Spirit – The Edinburgh Film Festival’s British films

The Edinburgh Film Festival’s British films demonstrate that original ideas make good films on low budgets possible.

What makes a film the best of the year? Among the nominees of the Edinburgh Film Festival’s Michael Powell prize for best British feature film, worth £20,000, some works strived to push the boundaries of language and style or to realize an original idea, whereas others probably made it on the list because of their particular “Britishness,” exploring specifically local themes. As expected, the latter, more conventional, pieces were defeated by the innovation of the former, and the prize was eventually awarded to – using the jury’s term – the most “challenging” film, Hide and Seek, about a commune founded by disillusioned young Londoners.

“Making the invisible visible” – the protagonist of Castles in the Sky, Robert Watson Watt, pulled a spectacular stunt to help the British air force triumph against the invading Germans at the beginning of the Second World War. He invented the radar, which detected incoming aircraft while they were still invisible to the naked eye. It’s a smart plot idea, since the whole existence of the cinema is built on a similar magic trick; every film makes an invisible story visible on the screen. Unfortunately the director was not a skilled enough magician to conjure an exciting movie out of the impressive innovation. The opening scene promises a lot of excitement, showing how the Brits originally wanted to create a death ray against the Germans, but the end product is only a conventional drama, instead of a tense thriller. Director Gillies MacKinnon commemorates the inventor, who, in his opinion, was never duly credited. He tells the story of the big invention boringly, without going into any of the technical details; this way the only novelty we come across is that the revolutionary ideas, striking down like lightning, mostly happen while playing cricket.  Instead of explaining how radio waves behave, the director puts the emphasis on depicting Watson’s stressful emotional state: his career is kept in check by a rival physicist, wishing to sabotage the project at all costs; while in his private life, he is blackmailed by his wife, left alone while he works. This way, the country’s heroic saviour becomes an ignorant husband, whose secret mission for the sake of the homeland puts his otherwise perfectly harmonious marriage at risk. Despite the slightly caricatured, absent-minded professor role, Eddie Izzard’s performance is convincing in the lead. The low-budget movie skilfully cloaks the tight financial constraints; it uses archive footage to depict the war scenes, and the décor and elaborate (sometimes even overly eye-catching) costumes evoke the era nicely, especially if you can spot the beauty and not the artificiality in scenes like the one in which Watt’s lonely wife (Laura Fraser) walks out to the garden to water the flowers in flawless dress and make up.

Guy and Matt Pitt’s film is the perfect example of how a well written script can turn a simple idea into a brilliant film, despite a low budget. Greyhawk – according to the summary – is about a man, who “loses his best friend and finds himself.” The man is blind and his lost friend is his guide dog. Even though he is unable to see, Mal is not at all a wretched and pitiable figure (in the opening scene we first meet him after having sex), but a strong soldier returned from Afghanistan, who usually accepts assistance from nobody. However, when his dog, Quince, goes missing, Mal is forced to ask for help from his fellow humans. This three-dimensional character is devoid of stereotypes, and his dog-hunting Calvary is built up with such sense of proportion – perfectly controlling the emotional peaks – that a viewer compared the film to a Shakespearean sonnet at the post-screening Q&A.

Mal’s character might have been a good opportunity to introduce a blind actor, but the Pitt brothers emphasised that they wanted to focus on the protagonist’s personality and not on his disability. Scriptwriter Matt Pitt created a flesh and blood character from Mal, and director Guy Pitt depicts his loneliness and isolation as a result of his loss of sight with visual tools and enhanced audio effects. The viewer’s spatial experience is distorted by an uncertain point of view and intentionally unfocused pictures: Mal is constantly seeking a solid spot in space for orientation, and so does the viewer, trying to find the focus in the picture. Often it is not even the picture but a sound – the snap of a bra strap or the click of the kettle – that helps us to find directions. The film’s simple story, categorized as a thriller, fulfils the genre expectations. At the peak of the film – the confrontation with the thief – both the protagonist and the viewer have their hearts in their throats. The housing estate’s withering greyness and threatening emptiness cut into our hearts like the shattered piece of glass into Mal’s hand as he stumbles through piles of rubbish. From a sociological perspective, the only condemning question that could be raised against the film is, how beneficial is a social criticism that demonises neglected teenagers of lower class housing estates?

Problematic British teenagers also inspired Antony Petrou’s film We Are Monster, although it adapts a real life story. Robert Stewart, a young criminal living in the Feltham Young Offenders Institution, murdered his cellmate in 2000. The event resulted in a huge outcry, because even though Stewart committed violent crimes and openly expressed racist views, in prison he was put in a cell with the Muslim Zahid Mubarek. Moreover, Mubarek, who was convicted for petty theft, had only hours till his release. The tragedy turned the public’s attention not only to the incapability of the institute and its employees, but also to a grave social problem, racism. We Are Monster is in general a faithful retelling of the real events, and the intention to provide justice to the Mubarek family screams from every frame. It does not desire to achieve this by judging the killer, but through mapping the motivation and the causes resulting in the murder. The killing itself is shown in the opening scene of the film, so its very structure directs the attention to how the protagonist gets to the point of committing the murder, and the horrific deed also serves as closure for the film. The story is almost exclusively constructed from Stewart’s dialogues with himself. Petrou illustrates the boy’s mental illness with an alter ego, visible also for the viewer, who talks in first person plural (hence the grammatically incorrect title) and constantly instigates “themselves” to commit the murder. Thus We are Monster is a highly theatrical one person play. Both Stewart’s alter egos are personified by Leeshon Alexander, who also took part in writing the script together with the director. The film shocks mostly with its language. Stewart’s hate-fuelled, unashamedly racist and violent rantings truly evoke fear: they are a hideously offensive torrent of taboo words, rarely ear-witnessed in every-day life. The dialogues, however – despite their shocking racist content – become repetitive and the intensity and tension is not maintained.

The festival’s most outstanding piece was Uberto Pasolini’s film: Still Life already won the prize for best direction at last year’s Venice Film Festival. The Italian born (now living in the UK) director’s film is a one-man-show chamber play about a low-level British council officer. John May’s job is to find living relatives of individuals who died in solitude: he organizes the funerals, he listens to the sermons on his own, and he even writes the obituaries of the dead, complete strangers to him. The scenes’ carefully staged compositions mimic John May’s compulsively ordered world. He is lonely, living his life in a grey monotony, until one day he is shaken from his tedium. He attends the home of a deceased neighbour, opposite his own. Because of the “personal” attachment, John May is determined to do everything for this special, and last, big case and to find the relatives of the neighbour at any cost. This time someone – besides himself – has to be there at the funeral. In the heat of this personal mission, he comes out of his shell and does things that were completely unimaginable for him before: he sips hot chocolate instead of tea, he stands up against his boss, he asks a girl out… His portrayer, actor chameleon Eddie Marsan, won the festival’s award for best acting. The same actor very memorably played the neurotic, rude, hysterical driving teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. Here he personifies a completely opposite character, silent, polite and introverted. Pasolini’s direction, delicate and precisely elaborate in its every fine detail, gives room for the acting to flourish to its full potential. It is almost unbelievable, but the director includes the supernatural to the story with such delicacy, that it melts the hearts of even the biggest sceptics.

Four people stand around a burning coffin in a deserted field in the opening picture of the festival’s Best British Film award winner and most challenging film, Hide and Seek. This pagan rite evocation suggests something as horrifyingly crazy as The Wicker Man, but more is quickly revealed. Although we can feast our eyes on naked bodies just as much here, Joanna Coates’ film is completely devoid of horror elements; it is an aesthetically photographed, silent observation of an ideally portrayed utopia. Four London youths – two boys and two girls – disabused of all modern life’s innovations, regulations and commitments, move to a country house to form a commune. They spend the days playing badminton, and the evenings performing little plays for each other’s amusement. The bedroom is occupied each night by a different, rotationally selected couple. We do not know whether the four Generation Y youths are so disillusioned by the modern world that they try to create a fully opposite utopia, or if, in the melancholic hippies’ exodus of the world, we see the embodiment of social indifference’s “Carpe diem” impulse. The scriptwriter Daniel Metz (who also plays one of the leads) and the director Coates leave their character’s backgrounds and motivations perfectly open. The past tries to invade their isolated idyll only once: one of the girls’ ex-boyfriends unexpectedly shows up. This tension promising episode sheds light on a relationship drama, but it does not evolve. The fifth stranger disappears from the story just as quickly as he appeared; the group successfully copes with the outside world’s intrusion and emerges intact from the fight. Their body and soul harmony is almost irritatingly perfect: in this countryside the sun does not stop shining, the rain never falls, there is always enough food and “money” is an unknown problem. Besides the intruder, the group only has to overcome some initial shyness and, later, jealousy. The achieved and successfully sustained idyll: the cheeky games, the attractive performers and the shiny environment’s emanating charm radiates towards the viewer through compelling pictures. We are almost jealous. If only it were possible to live this way.

Originally published in print: British spirit. Edinburgh. Filmvilág. 2014/10 pp. 50-51.