Bruce McDonald, 2009, Canada, 96 mins
Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly
Review by Mike Bartlett
Welcome to the world's first Barthesian horror film. It was bound to happen some time. Film Studies and genre cinema have been converging for years look at the opening out of the mother subtext in the Alien franchise. But if they were going to combine into some new kind of organism like Seth Brundle and the fly it's perhaps predictable that it would be in the zombie movie. After all, George Romero has been honing the political-allegory-through-flesh-munching-cadavers for over 40 years (and doesn't look like stopping any time soon the sixth instalment of his Dead series just played at the Venice festival).
But here, Canadian director Bruce McDonald goes the whole hog, not only telegraphing the subtext within the main action (French literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes is actually mentioned in the dialogue) but making it the cause and cure of the zombie infestation itself. It's that tricky beast, language, you see. The first thing we hear in Pontypool is a voice (signifying communication) and it's telling us about the meaning behind the town Pontypool 's name (and therefore that of the film's title). The first thing we see is a word TYPO made up of the letters of that title appearing in the wrong order. Get those pens out, film students this is a movie that is demanding to be read.
The story itself revolves around an unemployed shock jock (a man who lives off language, get it? Are you keeping up at the back?), who is forced to DJ at a hicksville radio station. He turns up in the morning and from that point on nothing goes to plan, as reports fly in of citizens going crazy in the downtown area, killing people, eating their flesh, and generally being unpleasant. The film never leaves the building this is a one-set movie with a vengeance (it was partly based on a radio play). This can be justified, and is in some respects to Pontypool 's credit, because it means the whole narrative is conveyed through language alone. And the slippery quality of that language the way lies, fact and rumour can morph into and alter each other puts the audience in the same tense position as the protagonists, trying to make sense of events outside. Indeed, Pontypool could be said to be the bargain-basement bastard cousin of Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin in that the film represents an act of watching faces while interpreting a complex soundtrack.
But ultimately, the brass tacks reality of this gambit is that there's a lot of talk-talk-talk and little action. It's a relief when a zombie bashes their head against the sound booth glass. And it's not as if the actors are charismatic or distinctive enough to carry off such a tortuous conceit. The film has admirable social and political foundations; in some ways, it's a response to Peter Watkins' idea of the media as a monologue rather than a dialogue, the world of talkback radio here finding itself overwhelmed by outside voices rather than being in control of them. And it has witty points to make about the way information is communicated to us the BBC seems to know more about events than the local people, as in George Bush's Florida vote fiasco. But it's a pity that that the director's sense of film language is not as sophisticated as his discourse on the real thing. Such a stripped-down structure needs a filmmaker who can invest an aura of energy into even the most straightforward image, but McDonald's visual sense is terribly flat.
The problem really lies in the whole approach to the exercise. What is evident here, as in a lot of contemporary science-fiction and fantasy, is a misunderstanding of how genre works. Genre is like an iceberg. Above the water is a simple story that conforms to a set of conventions entertaining, straightforward. But that very simplicity, inflected by a good director or an intriguing central premise, allows for a mountain of themes, subtext and connected ideas to build underwater. A good example is Don Siegel's original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) which tells a lean, economic tale in just 80 minutes, but which has become a byword in the discussion of conformity versus non-conformity ever since. McDonald, on the other hand, is tipping the iceberg upside-down. He's saying, Look, here's the subtext, here are the themes, here's some clever reference to topical issues... You know, we've really thought about it. Which means the audience doesn't have to. There's little left under the water for them to discover. So that a film which foregrounds discussion and communication ultimately leaves its audience with nothing to say. |
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