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The hard road of life

A tough, uncompromising film worth catching
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 11th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
A lift to the gallows. Nathalie Press and Martin Compston in Red Road.
In Andrea Arnold’s 2003 Oscar-winning short film Wasp, an underclass mother, Zoe (Nathalie Press), does less than her best raising four children. In a wastescape of council flats, ill-lit chippies and lurid pubs on the margins of Dartford, Kent (itself a depressingly marginal place), Zoe attempts to lure an old boyfriend back into a relationship while keeping her kids out of sight, fearing that their discovery would scare off her beau.
Bribed with Cokes and packets of crisps, her four children, tangle-haired and with mouths still smeared with the morning’s jam, crouch behind dumpsters while their mother goes to work on her man at a nearby pub.
Red Road

Directed by Andrea Arnold
With Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Martin Compston, Nathalie Press and Andrew Armour

What made Wasp such a fascinating study of lost lives was Arnold’s refusal to either condemn or excuse Zoe’s actions. In her own confused way Zoe loves her children, even while sorely lacking the physical and emotional strength to properly raise them. While anyone observing her actions feels compelled to ring child social services to intervene, one cannot easily dismiss Zoe as a worthless mess or a monster. The ending, where Zoe’s maternal instincts override more selfish considerations, strikes that rare note between hope and sadness. Life for these very human, fallible characters can only ever be marginally better at best.
Arnold’s new feature-length film, Red Road, shares much with Wasp. Her characters are again the walking wounded among the working class, though their own confinement is within the breezeblock squalor of greater Glasgow.
The film begins with a bank of screens broadcasting images from hundreds of surveillance cameras stationed throughout the city. Jackie (Kate Dickie) is a monitor. It’s her job to watch her screens for any crimes that might be committed.
Jackie leads a solitary life. Other than a monthly meeting with a married man who takes her out into the country for quick, passionless sex in his work van, she seems almost reclusive. The only people she feels connected to she’s never met, though she routinely monitors them: a middle-aged man with a sick bulldog, a young, overweight charwoman who seems to be seeking love at work, etc.
On a late-night shift, Jackie’s attention is suddenly arrested by a man having sex with a woman behind a warehouse. As he turns away from this hasty encounter, the camera captures his face. Jackie knows him. She races home, and rifles through her closet until she finds a yellowing newspaper that carries the man’s face. Above his picture, the paper reports that he received a jail sentence for 10 years, although we don’t know for what crime.
Jackie (like James Stewart in Rear Window) becomes obsessed tracking this one man, first by the cameras at her disposal, then on foot. Her subject, Clyde (Tony Curran), leads a scavenger’s life. A rough-built man with once-handsome features, he lives in a council tower with a young, semi-feral lager lout, Stevie (Martin Compston), and Stevie’s girlfriend from London, April (Wasp’s Press).
What connects Jackie and Clyde? Did his crime involve Jackie? Arnold throws us into a bramble of possibilities. When Jackie becomes braver and actually trails Clyde into some cheerless caff to watch him, he turns and looks right at her, but doesn’t seem to know her. Jackie will push on further, eventually making her own body bait to snare Clyde. But why?
The sustained tension in Arnold’s film is at times unnerving, primarily as we cannot know Jackie’s motives for her actions. But, as in Wasp, none of these characters can be pegged as types. They are all human — horribly damaged, but possessing depth. The end, if not as satisfying as Wasp’s, nonetheless suggests that there is, if nothing else in this brutal world, forgiveness.
The performances are first-rate, particularly Dickie’s Jackie. Dickie takes her character from being a mild-mannered, almost mousy woman to a driven voyeur bent on revenge to the point of self-destruction. It’s a fearless, almost dangerous performance. Curran, the most recognizable actor in the cast, is solid as Clyde, a tough-mouthed wastrel who will be exposed as highly vulnerable. Press, with her Lenten pallor and dope-hardened eyes, is again riveting to watch.
Arnold, in her 40s, has come late to gaining acclaim. But the praise is primarily due to that quality that so many of her younger peers lack: maturity. Her films are worth seeking out.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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