East End Review

Category: FILM

Calvary review – ‘An incisive, thrilling and original piece of work’

Kelly Reilly and Brendon Gleeson in Calvary

John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary is at once raging and solemn. It rushes back and forth between the two states to dizzying effect, washing through its 101 minutes like the crashing waves of Ireland’s west coast sea, on which the film’s central, and sinful, parish rests. It’s a darkly comic musing on the fragmentation of an uprooted society and its most famous – or infamous – institution, the Catholic church. For all its splendour, though, there is something amiss, something distinctly Irish.

The film opens to a shadowy confession-box exchange between Brendan Gleeson’s Father James Lavelle and a troubled parishioner, who promises to kill the good priest in vengeance for the sexual abuse he suffered as a child. He gives Lavelle a week to put his things in order before a high noon-style showdown on the waterfront. “Killing a priest on a Sunday,” he says – “that’ll be a good one.”

The early scenes often slide into stunning overhead shots of County Sligo, evoking something of Ireland’s champion of religious critique, novelist John McGahern, who was born in the adjacent County Leitrim and would set many of his bruising portraits of rural-Catholic life in the wilds of the bordering Roscommon. It’s an evocation that I couldn’t shake off for the entire film, doing McDonagh something of a disservice.

A striking difference between the director and McGahern lies in the latter’s tender handling of a fading way of life. Despite the scathing nature of his work, the author would delicately lament the loss of elements of the farming communities of which he wrote. It’s not that McDonagh’s work is off the mark in turning its back on local identity, it’s that there is too little of McGahern’s fascinating Ireland left for my liking, beyond the rolling hills and tattered reputation of the ailing church.

This is perhaps the result of the 20-plus years that have passed since the author’s thumping Amongst Women was nominated for the Booker Prize, with the generational shift leaving too little of that past to justifiably cling on to. Not one of McDonagh’s characters appears to belong, and while this is intentional, and affective in its own right, the absence of history leaves a gaping hole – for me anyway. The film’s gorgeous sounds and images suffer from a kind of hollowness as a result. Even Lavelle is an outsider, drafted onto the land that was once every bit a part of its inhabitants – for better or worse. The majority of Calvary’s figures are displaced and at a loss; it’s a bankruptcy that is a harsh but honest reflection of the times.

This half criticism is based on a personal grievance and should take little away from the film’s considerable merit. Gleeson is sublime as the widower priest, who, to begin with, looks only mildly perturbed by the murderous threat hanging over his head. Recovering from alcohol addiction and offering counsel to his damaged visiting daughter – who, following her father’s departure for the priesthood, was left to deal with the loss of two parents in quick succession – the good shepherd continues to tend his wayward, eccentric and exasperating flock, knowing that one is the mysterious confessor set on spilling his blood.

With a tongue as sharp as cheese wire, chewing hungrily on the nourishing dialogue, but softened by deep, compassionate gestures, it’s hard to think of Gleeson in better form. His composure as he marches on towards his reckoning is mightily impressive. It’s reminiscent of his turn in McDonagh’s brother Martin’s comic gem, In Bruges; I half expected Colin Farrell or Ralph Fiennes to pop up at any moment as the would-be killer.

Overall, McDonagh has plumped for and executed something that is effective almost to a fault. While I can’t help wonder if it would work better on the stage, there is no denying that Calvary is an incisive, thrilling and original piece of work. Packed with an abundance of distinct and amusing characters, coupled with penetrating insight, it might just be the best McDonagh film, and that’s saying something. I’ll have to watch it again and see – with McGahern stashed away on the bottom shelf for good measure.

Calvary is showing at the Barbican Cinema, Beech Street, EC2Y 8AE until 24 April.

April 22, 2014
How We Used to Live: a love letter to London

Hackney-based author Travis Elborough, author of How We Used to Live

How We Used To Live, which screened at last year’s London Film Festival and looks set to run on limited release this spring, is a love letter to a London that no longer exists, to that peculiar era after the Second World War when empire was dismantled yet Britain, and its capital city in particular, inspired a global cultural revolution.

Hackney-based writer Travis Elborough was one of a team of four who crafted the picture, along with members of pop group Saint Etienne Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, and the director Paul Kelly.

“As someone who usually writes books alone, I found it all enormously enjoyable and creatively quite liberating,” reflects Elborough.

The film is a story of the city told through footage collected from the BFI National Archive, with music from Saint Etienne and melancholic musings from Ian McShane’s narrator.

Setting the scene of the film, Elborough addresses its titular conceit: “The London of How We Used to Live is a London of landlines, vinyl records and cassettes, newspapers and news bulletins, its working days more readily defined, if not nine to five then something closer to it, its public transport still in public hands, ditto its utilities and much of its housing.”

But for all that the film is a celebration of yesteryear, How We Used To Live does not resort to ‘good old days’ sentimentality. “We can and probably do all worry that too much of the old stuff is getting lost, but equally the place would ossify if nothing ever changed,” Elborough says.

The film drifts back and forth in time and has a hypnotic, dream-like quality. This is best illustrated in a sequence where a curly-haired skateboarder glides down Tower Bridge, just barely avoiding pedestrians, while the music swells.

“That scene is just one of those absolute gems that you unearth when producing a film like this,” enthuses Elborough.

The narrative, spoken in McShane’s distinctive tone, amplifies this sense of London as a dream but is firmly rooted in reality. “The narrator is intended to be the kind of voice of memory, so we have things like defunct telephone dialling codes, the shipping forecast, and we have snippets of nursery rhymes, the names of roundabouts and road junctions, and quizzical remarks and questions, as well as thoughts about the city and London.”

An atmospheric documentary without coherent narrative is always going to be tough to sell to audiences, so how would Elborough pitch it? “How We Used to Live is The Spirit of ’45 for fans of Kent 45s – the classic northern soul label whose releases were cherished by mods back in the day,” he says. And if you understand that reference then this film was most certainly made for you.

See How We Used to Live at Curzon Soho on 16 April.

April 11, 2014
My Stuff – review

Stuff and nonsense? Petri Luukainen ponders his possessions in My Stuff

Like many of us, Petri Luukainen had too much stuff. But unlike many of us, he decided to put everything he owned into storage for a year.

In doing so, he embarked on an exciting ‘human experiment’ which he chose to film. The end result is My Stuff, Finnish docudrama based on the bizarre personal experiences of the director himself, Petri Luukainen.

After a difficult break-up with his long-term girlfriend, Petri descends into quarter life existential crisis mode. He realises his possessions have come to define his very existence and failed to bring him any real happiness, and he finally reaches breaking point.

To solve the problem, he decides to put all his possessions into storage. He is left alone, naked and possessionless in his empty apartment in Helsinki.

Petri sets aside a year in which he can retrieve one item from storage per day. He also forbids himself from buying anything new during these 365 days. Day one sees him running through the snow butt-naked to retrieve his long coat – luckily this doubles up as a standby blanket for the night.

Cutting through his clutter, Petri reappraises his life via his belongings. Each day, he struggles over what is more necessary – a toothbrush, a sock or a sofa.

On the second day of the experiment, he collects his shoes, on the third his blanket and on the fourth his jeans. As the days progress, Petri discovers he can get by with one hundred things, this includes a laptop, debit card, diary and swimming trunks.

In the attempt to discover what he needs to live a wholesome but comfortable life, Petri learns a lot over the course of the year. In turn, this 29-year old recognises the difference between possessions which he needs and those which he simply wants.

After the screening at a Q&A session, the filmmaker confirmed it was an experiment that took a lot of courage. “I was forced to take control of my life, challenge my needs and actually be honest with myself,” he said.

The film apparently came about by accident: “One day I looked around at all the useless shit in my crowded apartment which I’d bought to fulfil some spots in my soul and I thought ‘what would happen if I transported all this stuff someplace else?’. I needed a fresh start. My friends jokingly suggested I film it so we did.”

As Petri is slowly freed from the burden of his possessions, he falls in love with a new girlfriend half way through the year.

What is more, after his grandmother falls ill, she wisely points out that: “Life does not consist of things and things are just props,” summing up the fundamental message of the film.

Through his own personal journey, Petri’s subtle yet bold documentary manages to shed light on the materialistic nature of consumer society.

www.day-for-night.org/cinematheque

April 11, 2014
Hitchcock’s East End

A mosaic at Leytonstone underground station of a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca

Waltham Forest has spawned many famous sons – William Morris, Brian Harvey and, yes, Alfred Hitchcock.

The master of suspense was born in Leytonstone and was the son of an East End greengrocer.

It is thought he got his first taste of the magic of the silver screen at the now derelict EMD Cinema in Walthamstow’s Hoe Street.

There is a plaque commemorating Hitchcock’s birthplace (now a petrol station) on Leytonstone High Road, and there’s a hotel near Epping Forest that is named after the great man.

It is also true that several glorious mosaics depicting scenes from Hitchcock’s most famous films adorn the inside of Leytonstone Tube Station.

But apart from these somewhat modest focal points, reminders of the director’s links with the East End are strangely absent. Until now.

Early this month the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow Village played host to two screenings of one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, The Birds, starring Tippi Hedren, as part of The Barbican’s ‘Hitchcock’s East End’ season.

This atmospheric small museum was decorated with origami birds, and ornithological tea towels featuring ‘the birds of Waltham Forest’ (kingfishers, kestrels, coots, etc) were among the themed objects available to buy. To judge from the demand there is no shortage of interest in Hitchcock’s local connections, and the ‘rediscovery’ of this Hollywood legend’s Waltham Forest origins has conveniently coincided with the growing cultural renaissance in this area, whose residents exult in its newfound reputation as ‘Awesomestow’.

The Barbican has produced mini walking guides which can be downloaded from its website and which let locals lead themselves on a tour of the streets the young Hitchcock would have walked down to see if they can spot features that might have influenced his films.

A big outdoor screening is, it is rumoured, being planned for this summer as the finale to this series of events. For the latest information on this keep checking The Barbican’s website.

Create London, an arts organisation that is also working on the project, says on its website that the Hitchcock programme leads towards “the opening of the new Empire Cinema in late 2014…which will form part of a major regeneration project, The Scene at Cleveland Place, a new leisure destination for Waltham Forest.”

As one of the artform’s most influential figures, Hitchcock would surely have approved of a new picture palace opening on his boyhood turf.

What a shame, however, that the Hoe Street picturehouse – a beautiful venue whose future has been the subject of a long and continuing saga – still languishes amid the ranks of London’s boarded-up ghost cinema.

The Barbican

March 10, 2014
Pie-oneers of fast food

Traditional fare: an East End pie and mash shop

As a kid in the 90s, whenever we visited my Granddad at the family home in Leyton, it became a habit to stop off en route at a pie mash shop. We’d drive via the North Circular from suburban trappings where the precursors to today’s identikit high streets – Burger King, Our Price, Dixons and Woolworths – had taken root. From a menu solely comprised of ratios of beef mince pie to mash, the only necessary choice is whether to go for the single ‘one and one’ or plump for a double. Sitting on immovable chairs we’d top vast bowls of luminous green parsley liquor with chilli vinegar from the pierced lids of vodka bottles, occasionally daring to try the traditional trimming of jellied eels.

For a six-year-old it was a peculiar experience. If the past is a foreign country then pie mash shops with their ornately-tiled walls with photos of Pearly kings and queens and great tanks of writhing eels spoke of especially exotic climes of London’s history. European Eels begin their life as larvae in the depths of the Sargasso Sea, undergoing various stages of metamorphosis during a three-year passage along the Gulf Stream to the freshwater rivers of Europe. Able to survive in almost any water and resilient to the industrial filth of the mid-eighteenth century Thames, the jellied variety of the cheap and plentiful serpentine fish became a Cockney staple. During the Victorian era, they would be plucked from estuarine mud flats and shipped live to eel pie purveyors, landing finally on the working class dinner plates of some of London’s oldest fast food outlets.

M. Manze’s pie mash shop in Walthamstow, which opened in 1929, was awarded Grade II listed status in October last year, and whilst many of the buildings themselves are remarkable, the people that populate them – the staff, the owners and the customers – are what keeps these pockets of history breathing. Before cameraman Chris Brunner and I set out to document them through a series of interviews we were weary of a predictable narrative bemoaning the loss of a bygone era. Instead we found an industry on the wane perhaps but by no means in decline.

A century since the pie mash hey day, owners three or four generations deep into the business, who share their name with their shops, have willing inheritors of the family recipes. Far from an obscure tourist curiosity, patrons enjoying a ritual family expedition or lining the stomach before a day at the Millwall pack the places on Saturdays. Though we didn’t get to meet him, apparently Leytonstone lad David Beckham still pops into his favourite shop in Waltham Abbey for a two and two. The European Eel is classified as critically endangered, but recent signs suggest the decline has halted or even reversed. Like their wares, the institution that is pie mash continues to endure, nourishing London’s Cockney soul. Make mine a double.

www.georgesteptoe.co.uk

March 10, 2014
UK Film Festival returns to Aubin Cinema

Buzkashi Boys: one of the star films of last year’s festival

Independent filmmakers from around the world will have the chance to showcase their work at the UK Film Festival, which returns this month to the Aubin Cinema in Shoreditch.

The festival, now in its third year, provides unsung talent as well as more established independent filmmakers a platform to have their work screened to a wider audience. Last year’s big discovery Buzkashi Boys, directed by Sam French, went on to achieve an Oscar nomination, and the festival was also instrumental in broadcasting another winner Why Don’t We Do It In The Road on Channel 4.

Filmmakers Murray Woodfield and Mahdi Hussein Nejad set up the festival in 2011 as an alternative to major festivals which they believed no longer served those ‘unheard voices’ in film.

“All major festivals will tell you that they’re looking for the next big talent but they become mainstream and so sought after that new voices don’t get much of a look in,” says Woodfield.

By the festival’s second year they found they were receiving a lot of submissions from established filmmakers, leading them to change
their policy.

“We decided that half of our films would be from quite well established people and other the half from that very new emerging talent. It is not very difficult because there are so many extremely talented new filmmakers out there making it easy to find amazing material done by people that no one – even in the film industry – has heard of.”

This year the festival has brought in the acclaimed director Petros Silvestros to help choose the films, a move that Woodfield claims has raised the level of professionalism.

He says: “ The films in the first year were good, the lms we had in the second year were excellent – but these ones are exceptional and I’m not just bandying these words around.”

Three features already on the programme are the Italian drama Miele (Honey) by Valeria Golin, romantic melodrama The Broken Circle Breakdown directed by Felix Van Groeningen and Clio Barnard’s The Selfish Giant based on the Oscar Wilde story of the same name.

Festivals like Raindance already claim to be celebrating the best of independent film, but Woodfield is confident that the UK Film Festival offers something different.

“We’re newer, we’re younger in terms of what we look for and although I’ve got great respect for Raindance we’re not doing quite the same as them – we’re taking a younger look.”

The UK Film Festival is at the Aubin Cinema, 64-66 Redchurch St, E2 7DP from 11-15 November

November 6, 2013
Tom Marshman: searching for the lost gay cockneys

Artist: Tom Marshman performs in Move Over Darling: The Lost Gay Cockneys

In Move Over Darling: The Lost Gay Cockneys, artist Tom Marshman uses the testimonies of over 60s to explore a forgotten generation of gay people in East London.

Marshman’s work is often autobiographical, but as part of his continuing LGBT oral history, he is calling on the experiences of others.

“I guess what inspired me was because often those voices aren’t really heard in the mainstream – there’s much more visibility around younger gay people,” says Marshman.

The project began with a tea party, which Marshman describes as an active social space that allows people to identify shared experiences through a series of sensory triggers.

“Part of quite a lot of gay people’s make up is having to hide something, which is still present somehow – it’s about when you’re open and when you’re closed.”

And in creating a safe space where these memories can be discussed, Marshman has managed to unearth a multitude of memories.

“Within these interviews I’ve heard so many interesting minuscule and massive moments in people’s lives,” he says. “From a lesbian couple being the first to get married through to someone having a little book in their desk which they used to record a list of everyone they knew who had died of HIV.”

The voice of the older generation provides an insight into a number of monumental moments at a time where homosexuality was highly controversial and attitudes towards it were rapidly changing.

“Older gay people have a lot to say about their experience,” he says.

“Some people talk about it as if it was a bit more fun because it was illicit and it was undercover – others were really excited about the change and were instrumental in moving it forward.”

Move Over Darling: The Lost Gay Cockneys is at Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, E1 6LA

November 6, 2013
Late At Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness – East London documentary to premiere at London Film Festival

Xiaolu Guo: Photograph by Philippe Ciompi

Prolific Chinese-British filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo has been the central force behind no less than eleven films and nine novels, and was this year named one of Granta magazine’s twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. She has lived in Paris, Berlin and Beijing, but now resides in East London.

This month sees the première at the London Film Festival of the artist’s latest documentary film, Late At Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness.

Capturing the human cost of capitalism, Late At Night… focuses on the stories of those who inhabit East London, many of them immigrants, and hints at the personal and physical struggles they face to reach these shores.

A beguiling mixture of character study, archival material, old news reports, snippets of literary sources, and a surprising choice of soundtrack – from firebrand British-Jamaican ‘dub poet’ Linton Kwesi Johnson to the ubiquitous king of Nigerian Afrobeat, Fela Kuti – the documentary explores issues of alienation, a theme already touched on with her novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.

“The film is really an impressionistic mosaic of people from the area”, she says. “It is about those voices we barely listen to in day-to-day life, like street people, for instance. We live amongst them yet we barely talk to them”.

Living in East London she describes as a “rough and complicated experience”: “I don’t find it easy to live around here,” Xiaolu admits, hinting at her own sense of alienation from her surroundings. She says: “I think urban environments in big cities are the most alienated spaces on Earth. I find it extremely unsettling in this country that people pay so much attention to the Royal Family’s wedding and big celebrities’ private life, yet have so little interest in looking at the vast underclass of society – street people, beggars, and working-class people who are everywhere in our neighbourhood.”

Describing her ability to combine artistic disciplines as a filmmaker, producer, scriptwriter, poet, and novelist, Xiaolu says: “I cannot stay still. I do enjoy the differences between these media, but I cannot see myself as a professional filmmaker in the sense that I don’t trust the film industry these days at all. Too much fake stuff and bubbles. Vanity and media power seem to swallow the truth of cinema – when I say cinema, I don’t mean mono-cinema Hollywood.”

Instead, Xiaolu’s work feels rooted in reality, away from the glamour and excess of the film industry. She remains a real outsider artist.

Late at Night: Voices of Ordinary Madness is showing at Rich Mix on 10 October at 6.30pm as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

October 8, 2013