Dir. Thomas Clay, UK, 2005, 96 mins
Cast: Dan Spencer, Ryan Winsley, Charles Mnene, Danny Dyer
Review by Kevin Gill
Thomas Clay's The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael is an exceptionally slow burner, but that's not necessarily an indictment of the British writer-director's debut feature. The film functions mostly as little more than a prolonged build-up to one appalling episode, in which the eponymous 15-year-old and his two mates break into the country home of a local celebrity chef and his American wife and whoop it up A Clockwork Orange-style with a drug hazed, blood-soaked orgy of extreme physical violence and brutal sexual assault.
One senses very early on that something unpleasant is brewing. With DoP Yorgos Arvanitis (a specialist in disquieting cinema who's CV includes collaborations with Angelopoulos and Breillat), Clay creates a sense of the humdrum pace of life in the murky south coast fishing town where the action takes place, setting his stall out with long, static takes. When the image cuts, it invariably does so with slow dissolves. When the camera moves, it's with slow pans or slower zooms.
Robert's isolation is immediately indicated as he sits in a dark empty room playing his cello, the instrument symbolising here both an educated upbringing and a sombre worldview. At school he gets a lecture from a progressive teacher warning him against falling in with the wrong crowd and as he lurks outside waiting for his no-good mates a female peer spits abuse at him: “Keep your filthy eyes to yourself Robert Carmichael. You're such a rapist!” Like Robert, we take her words with a pinch of salt, but a more overt sign of sexual deviancy materialises when we see him masturbating with a copy of de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom. Newcomer Dan Spencer gives a brave and subtle performance as the awkward, impressionable teenager and elicits both our discomfort and sympathy until the last possible moment.
Like an earlier scene at a squalid flat, the stomach-churning denouement is brilliantly staged. In the warm glow of idyllic domesticity Clay offers the viewer everywhere to look and nowhere to hide: his dispassionate camera simply sits back, frequently capturing all five sorry protagonists, and allows the terrifying action to play out. As the boys' manic violence intensifies, booming cello chords on the soundtrack take increasingly warped forms, sounding like an avant-garde Mike Leigh score, and despite the audience's grim realisation that this crazed gang is capable of anything, Robert's final act of brutality – a humiliated reaction to his inadequacy as a rapist – comes as a sickening shock that will stay with the viewer long after the credits roll. In a sinister homage to Deep Throat, Clay inserts grainy newsreel footage of World War Two, starting with a series of explosions, immediately after Robert's last ecstatic thrust.
Set during the days around the fall of Baghdad in March 2003, the spectre of past and present wars haunt Carmichael: crackly radio broadcasts of Hitler and Churchill accompany the opening images, school kids hang out at war memorials and Messrs. Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld blurt out speeches on neglected televisions. Clay thus rather forcibly invites us to read “Operation Home Invasion” (head droog Joe's refreshingly honest label for his gang's escapade on foreign soil) as a microcosmic version of the West's figurative rape and pillage of Iraq and her citizens. He's laying down a moral challenge to the audience, it seems, asking them to bear witness to atrocity and suffering, condemn it, and then ask how it compares to our activity in the Middle East.
That is a provocative and valuable question, but it's also a rather contrived way of posing it. Our response to the barbarity is visceral, not emotional, and in a sense that renders what passes before somewhat superfluous. Ultimately, Clay sacrifices a wholly coherent narrative – his lucid storytelling style also offers a plethora of characters, particularly Angry Young Man Joe (Winsley), lots of their own screen time – in order to propagate an anti-war message.
The director has thrown himself in at the business end of cinematic representation and cannily so, because the stir Carmichael will cause (it's already sparked frenzied debate at Cannes) more or less guarantees a green light on a second project. One can't help but wonder where this daring young Brit can possibly go from here.
|
