Christine (1987) + Road (1987)
(Alan Clarke)
A double bill in BFI’s Alan Clarke season, Christine and Road were both originally screened in 1987 in the BBC’s Screenplay slot. The two pieces are different in many ways but a shared feature and strength of them is the dynamism of sequences in which people walk across the screen with a handheld camera in close attendance. The walking looks purposeful even though, in most cases, the character’s destination hardly vindicates that sense of purpose.
This is the only strong element of Christine, in which the thirteen-year-old title character (Vicky Murdock) tramps round a suburban estate, like a kid district nurse, dispensing and partaking of heroin. (The street signs feature the names of Lake Poets, which connects the estate rather strangely with the one on which Reggie Perrin lived.) Christine’s main port of call is the house where her friend Eddie (Kelly George) is staying with his married brother and sister-in-law, both of whom are out at work. The youngsters exchange small talk before injecting themselves, which they do with a mixture of concentration and indifference. The play, written by Clarke and Arthur Ellis, doesn’t build, except in the sense that Christine’s routine may alarm the viewer and that routine is repeated. The adolescents on the screen aren’t actors to any noticeable degree. They’re cast for a particular look – just the one. When they speak, the surface realness of the film is undermined by their clumsy readings: they sound like actual people only to the extent that they’re actual teenagers trying and failing to act naturally. We soon get the point that the kids’ lives are meagre, the kids are affectless and Alan Clarke is eschewing dramatic incident. Christine lasts only fifty-two minutes but that’s a long enough time in which to convey and achieve boringness.
Road is something else, a sixty-two minute adaptation of Jim Cartwright’s stage play, which started life at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs in 1986. The actors are drawn from the first two Royal Court casts: not the least interest of the piece comes from seeing in their early or mid-twenties people who’ve since gone on to lasting screen careers – David Thewlis, Jane Horrocks, Neil Dudgeon, Lesley Sharp. The contemporary political context is sharper in Road than in Christine. The working-class characters in Jim Cartwright’s play live in a deprived area of Lancashire, in the heart of Thatcher’s Britain. (The kids on heroin in Christine are not poor: we’re meant to assume they get hold of drugs using their own pocket money.) Alan Clarke doesn’t attempt to disguise Road’s theatre origins and substance. These are increasingly salient in the physical arrangement of characters on the screen, the audience-confronting monologues, the choruses. But the piece is powerfully – and humorously – kinetic: when the suited-up Brink (Dudgeon) and Eddie (William Armstrong) march out at the start of their evening; when a desperate-for-sex middle-aged woman (Susan Brown) totters down the street in pursuit of a young soldier (Tim Dantay) even drunker than she is; when Brink and Eddie head back with the girls they’ve paired up with – Louise (Horrocks) and Carol (Mossie Smith) seem to take a half-dozen steps for every one taken by the men.
The first of these sequences is scored to the Nolans’ ‘I’m in the Mood for Dancing’ and sets the pattern for the imaginative soundtrack. Song lyrics are matched, with a measure of irony, to the images on the screen but the numbers aren’t only apt in this way: the music in them also fits with the emotional energy (and sometimes conflict) of the scene in which they feature. This is especially true of Clarke’s bravura staging of a down-the-pub ensemble, accompanied by Mel and Kim’s ‘Respectable’, and of the Otis Redding cover of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’, which Eddie puts on a cassette player, when Louise and Carol have gone back with him and Brink to a derelict house. The use of noise in competition with music – a vacuum cleaner versus a transistor radio, and so on – is effective too. Road was shot on location, in and around the former coal-mining town of Easington in County Durham, but Alan Clarke and Stuart Walker, his gifted designer, poise the look of the piece between realism and expressionism.
The suicide of Joey (Thewlis) and his woebegone girlfriend Clare (Moya Brady) is presented as a natural conclusion to the poverty and ill health in which they’re trapped. A more interesting convergence of the characters’ sexual needs and anger with the larger indigence of their lives is expressed in the succession of monologues, from Eddie, Brink, Louise and Carol, which form the climax to Road. All four actors are impressive here – although he’s now less well known than the other three, William Armstrong more than holds his own.
Another remarkable monologue is the one spoken by Lesley Sharp’s character Valerie, who makes a single appearance in the film and – always on the move – talks bitterly about her miserable marriage. Sharp’s delivery of the monologue is a determined tour de force, although it has the effect of drawing attention to the rhythms of Jim Cartwright’s writing and away from the character. In spite of the fact that Valerie is always looking down, Sharp is also one of the more camera-conscious performers in Road. The most camera-conscious, and intentionally so, is Andrew Wilde, in the small but memorable role of Louise’s grease-monkey brother. He appears at the very start, daubing his sister’s face with motor oil when she’s finished doing her make-up and is all ready to go out. As she runs upstairs to start all over again, the (unnamed) brother looks straight at the viewer and bellows. There are no words, only a noise, but the message is clear. Pretending to startle us – for a laugh – but at the same time meaning to, he wants to know ‘What you staring at??’
30 April 2016
