Locke

Directed by Steven Knight

Who’d have thought concrete could be so exciting! In the uneventful suburbs where I’m currently confined for the duration while cinemas feel as irrecoverably dark as Milton’s eyesight, any activity might spark off a cinematic memory. Our enterprising neighbour is currently widening his drive (He’s learned what to do off YouTube), and today is the day of the pouring of the concrete. Cue the sweet Welsh tones of Tom Hardy, ‘You don’t trust God when it comes to concrete’, in Locke, a film where the (unseen) pouring of concrete achieves Platonic perfection while the rest of his enviably ordered life falls apart. If you haven’t seen this uniquely affecting and satisfying film, and especially if you have nothing much to do for the next 12 weeks, seek it out.

A man drives away from his job and his home late one night, his life disintegrating with every mile and every hand-free phone conversation. Tom Hardy as construction engineer Ivan Locke is the only character on screen, mostly in full face close-up. He’s a man who has ‘always run a tight ship’ in his professional life, has a close, sound, family life, and clearly rarely does anything unconsidered, as his deliberate and thoughtful delivery indicates. But one wrong act – and that indeed done out of a generous motive – is unravelling his life.

Any thoughts you might have had coming into this film of it’s being some kind of radio play with ideas above its station are immediately cast aside – despite Tom Hardy’s mellifluous Welsh tones being strongly reminiscent of, and equally seductive as, Dylan Thomas’s in the big daddy of all radio plays Under Milk Wood. Its whole essence is filmic. It’s not just that Hardy’s face is infinitely interesting in its nuances as the damage that he knows will come unfurls from his actions, it’s the surprisingly mesmeric effect of night time driving as lights blur and meld and shadowy doubles and triples of his face swim around reflected in windscreen and side windows.

At the mercy of long-distance communication, he’s good at telling people everything will be alright, they will cope, he will be where he says he will, but aspects of life are beyond his control, as the waiting, demanding, woeful calls pile up on his screen. ‘I’ll explain when I get there’, ‘wait till I am with you’ are his constant mantra, but emotions won’t wait, and unlike ‘his’ concrete waiting to be poured in the ‘biggest operation of its kind in Europe’ in the morning, that can be checked and perfected, it’s hard to get the shoring up of close relationships fixed at a distance.

The dilapidation of his life is always seen as a moral conundrum as well as emotionally moving, and it can be no coincidence that his name recalls not just that other dislocated wanderer, Jack Nicholson’s David Locke in Antonioni’s The Passenger, but John Locke the philosopher who was the first to describe man as ‘that conscious thinking thing’. Locke is a thinking man, whose painful consciousness of his moral dilemma and the un-mendability of his actions we’re acutely aware of as the tiniest tightenings of his expression undercut his calm and authoritative delivery. Stuck as he is in a situation where there is no clearly right thing to do, he juggles his responsibilities at a distance in a suspenseful way that’s just as thrilling as many a murder or adventure romp. We hold our breath as he instructs an increasingly punch-drunk subordinate (Andrew Scott) to check concrete shuttering (although it’s at the other end of a phone, I feel I’ve actually watched that desperate sprint down through the dark to fetch the Polish road-mending gang from their lamplit work). Who’d have thought concrete could be so exciting! Success on one operation means you almost forget about the bad stuff. But meanwhile the agony of his very recognisably normal family life slowly disintegrating is almost unbearable to witness, especially with two marvellous performances from Tom Holland and Bill Milner (of Son of Rambow) as his two young sons on what will be their last night of untainted family happiness.

That Steven Knight has previously been a screen writer shows in the perfectly judged script. But that he has triumphantly gone that further step into directing is revealed in the look of the thing, the sudden moments of magic in a banal night drive, where oncoming headlamps can suddenly acquire the look of floating pairs of angels, and coloured lights dappling Locke’s face mirror the light and dark of the moral complexity of his situation. It’s engrossing from start to finish, and a terrifically powerful performance from Hardy, showing once again that he’s one of our very best film actors.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema Newcastle, 29 April 2014 (originally appearing in Floatation Suite)

 

Cinema Made in Italy, Ciné Lumière, March 4-10 Part 1 Flesh Out (Il corpo della sposa)

Directed by Michela Occhipinti

If, due to the fast-approaching Corona virus, slightly fewer people than usual gathered at Kensington’s French Institute in early March for this year’s 10^th edition of Cinema Made in Italy, this film was one of London filmgoers’ major losses. Possibly the best film of the seven-day- long screenings, it’s both a disturbing portrait of a specific traditional practice and the personal tragedy of a young woman forced to undergo it. And more widely it’s a studied and distressing view of one of the ways women distort themselves, willingly or unwillingly, for men’s gaze.

The practice in Mauretania of gavage, a ‘fattening up’ of a bride preliminary to her marriage, seems both horrific and almost impossible to believe, particularly as these young women are otherwise relatively liberated – they move more or less freely around their world, have jobs, use social media, and have girls’ nights out, like their western counterparts. Yet the old tradition has them awakened by their mothers in the small hours of the night to drink quantities of milk – a reversal of the traditional comfort of mother’s milk – regularly weighed, and badgered to eat huge portions of unappetising food at meal times. Because here being fat, as in the West being fashionably slim, is a sign of wealth. And as all a mother wants for her child is the security of a socially upward marriage, with wealthy dowry, it follows that a bride’s family must itself appear socially and economically acceptable. And yet this beautiful, contemplative film is never polemical, never apportioning blame, never commenting – all it does is show.

Central figure Verida is played by first-time actress Verida Beitta Ahmed Deiche, echoing some of her own experiences, and goodness what a screen presence she is. From the moment we meet her eyes over a bowl of milk in the opening shot, we travel through the film with her, seeing the world through her shy and increasingly despairing eyes. The superb cinematography (by Daria Antonio, who also shot the beautiful Stolen Days also seen this weekend, as well as last year’s rave Ricordi) moves slowly through Verida’s world. There’s beauty in the banal – the slow pouring of milk, the gorgeous fabrics of the young women’s garments – and horror in the hanging meat in the butcher’s shop which we see with Verida’s nauseous eyes. And most horrific of all, a nightmare-like sequence where she’s led into the desert to a tent where an old crone force-feeds other young women, under restraint, with the milk they have vomited. Does this happen, or are we looking into her worst imaginings?

Her friends, chattering of their jobs abroad, magazines, soap operas, clothes, are sympathetic, most of them have been through gavage themselves, but, perhaps most shockingly, now see it as less a means of becoming married than a means of escape, a necessary rite of passage. Because once married under this harsh tradition, they become wealthy women in their own right, and amazingly are allowed freedom to divorce and remarry some one of their own choosing. But still for Verida this seemingly never-ending low-grade torture preoccupies every thought. And in the bedroom her lively little sister looks curiously on, as we’re uncomfortably aware that this will also be her fate in a few years time.

This is documentary-maker Occhipinti ‘s first foray into full-length feature-making, long in the planning since she first became aware of the practice and met Verida some years ago. Her slow and absorbing style is reminiscent of Iranian cinema, with painstaking concentration on faces, fabrics, household items and other minutiae of life, the dark spaces of home and the bustling life of a modern city. Never more so than the exquisitely shot scene where a modest but lower class young man who is attracted to Verida drives her home through the night-time streets, and against the profile of her face as they progress we see the blazing streetlights, cafes, busy food shops and young people, mostly male, walking and larking about in their freedom. Hopefully this film will get its due screenings in festivals later in the year. See it if you can.