Workers' Liberty

Everyone’s talking about the renaissance in British film, with the particular commercial success of The Full Monty, and the weight of British film-makers and actors in last and this year’s Oscar nominations. Over the past couple of years, films as diverse as Trainspotting, The English Patient, Secrets and Lies, and Nil By Mouth have been successful — not to mention the rash of lesser-known movies which are released every week (with countless more waiting for distribution deals).

What do these films tell us, if anything, about Britain in the 1990s?

If you look back at the history of cinema, British cinema included, as with every other art form it’s possible to work out a rough “periodisation”: films made in different decades tend to fall into patterns, are linked by themes or styles, in some way reflect the broader society which produced them.

Forties and fifties British films reflected a society rebuilding itself after the Second World War. Famously, around the turn of the 1950s and ’60s (and following changes in the theatre to which it was closely linked) British film entered a radically new period, dominated by social themes, featuring working class characters with regional accents played by younger, more “proletarian” actors. Films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, and This Sporting Life, and directors like Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz, transformed the image of British film; Harry Enfield rather accurately satirised them in a piece called It’s Grim Up North.

Older directors like Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death) were rejected as too fantastical and somewhat Tory (although Powell was later rehabilitated). British “gritty realism” became overhwelmingly dominant; Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, and more recently, Gary Oldman, are the inheritors of this tradition.

On a different note, even the Carry On films represent something about British society in the sixties and into the seventies which is identifiably distinct from the older Ealing comedies.

This was a society wrestling with its new post-war affluence, and new conceptions of class. The realist films of the sixties were intended to be a radical attack on the complacent, out-dated class prejudice of the past, to some degree celebrating working-class people, albeit usually from an educated middle-class perspective, and connected — if a bit intangibly — to the Labourite consensus of the post-war boom. They dealt with unmarried teenagers getting pregnant, upwardly mobile working class men out to make a fast buck, people living in a social landscape which was a far remove from the depictions of working-class life in earlier British films (like David Lean’s Hobson’s Choice, or Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, about a miners’ strike). When this tradition spilled over into television, where it arguably made its real home, it took up issues like homelessness (Loach’s Cathy Come Home).

Looking back at it, the patterns, the things which group all these films together and somehow unites them — what the Marxist critic Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” — are more or less obvious.

From the late sixties into the seventies, there is some reflection of the radicalism of that period. In its odd public school way, Lindsay Anderson’s If... demonstrates that kind of radicalism. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick is American, but I think this counts as a British film; in its heyday a lot of Hollywood films were directed by Europeans) was if anything prescient in its surrealist depiction of the violence of bored urban youth.

If things became vaguer by the early eighties, the breakthrough in the mid eighties also seems to have a bit of a zeitgeist to it. Leading the throng of films largely financed by the newly set-up Channel Four, My Beautiful Laundrette was about immigrants and sexuality — more or less new themes, quite different from older “gritty realism” (and much lighter in tone), and plainly reflecting how society had changed. Films referred much more to inner-city decay, and to a society in the grip of Thatcherism.

Raymond Williams argues, sensibly enough, that it’s easier to make these kind of generalisations in retrospect than it is at the time. But it’s worth asking, in the face of numerous attempts to do another Trainspotting, efforts at being the British Tarantino, and — for example — two recent films featuring, literally, fairies at the bottom of the garden, what the zeitgeist might be in the current renaissance, and what people might make of it in the future.

There are certain recognisable traditions in British film-making, aside from gritty urban realism. The English Patient stands firmly in one of those — which, over the past decade or so has probably been the dominant one, and which broadly speaking is that of David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, Passage to India), although Lean was a lot better. This is a tradition all about the past, and specifically the past of the English aristcracy and colonialism.

Whatever their stated or subjective intentions, these films glorify and prettify this past. The most successful perpetrators of this nostalgic, mythologised view of “England” and its place in the world have been, in recent years, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, who present us, in films from Room With a View to Howard’s End to Maurice to Remains of the Day, with an England populated entirely by endearing toffs, which is permanently enjoying a hot summer (but not too hot, heaven forbid), in which everyone drinks tea in the garden and wears nice frocks and tries terribly hard to keep their passions held in by a stiff upper lip, even if the passions have a tendency to erupt. The remarkable thing about these films, when you look at them historically, is that the only thing which distinguishes them from the stuff the sixties realists were rebelling against is that they are in colour — muted, soft-focus, quaint, no garish technicolour, but colour.

The English Patient differs from Merchant/Ivory offerings in that the colours are brighter and the summer is hotter (as Italian and Egyptian summers tend to be), but the social world isn’t any different. It’s colonials doing their thing, having their illicit passions, etc., etc., in that strange world — the colonies. Or Italy, which is only one step removed from a colony, and in any case hardly seems to contain any Italians. There is, when you finally get to it, a message about the prejudice of the colonial authorities, who take Ralph Fiennes to be a Hun, but a more prettified view of the colonial past, and of the white people inhabiting it, would be difficult to imagine.

Everything is so beautiful. Take the character played by Kirsten Scott-Thomas (another requirement in these films is at least one actress with a double-barelled surname). She is in a plane with her illicit lover which crashes in the desert. He leaves her alone, in a cave, while he treks across the gorgeously dangerous sand dunes for help, and she has almost no food, a lamp which is quickly extinguished, little to keep her warm, and a broken leg. What does she do? She writes a fucking poem.

The unavoidable message of these sumptuous, epic depictions of the English past, regardless of the ostensible drama, is that whatever else might be said, it was altogether more beautiful and poetic and admirable than the nastiness of contemporary reality. The toffs may have been cruel to the natives, but God they lived fabulously.

They do good box office in America, of course, these ridiculous, pseudo-lyrical picture postcards, which is why people keep funding them. But they have nothing to say of any interest. At least in the fifties the collapse of the Empire, and making sense of Britain’s new position in the world, was a real issue.

The most successful British film ever, until The Full Monty took its crown, was Four Weddings and a Funeral. Despite its stab at addressing contemporary themes — a gay character, who dies, of course, although (and Richard Curtis seems to think this is something seriously to be proud of) not of AIDS; a deaf person — Four Weddings is in much the same territory as Merchant/Ivory. We have the obligatory sunny gardens, a Scots mansion no less, and a hero with an accent that would make most English people advise him that if he really wants sex, it would be better not to speak. The film was self-consciously manufactured to be successful in America — so they got that right, and I suppose on one level who can blame them for trying?

If these films express anything about British society today, it is that you need to pander to American fantasies of Englishness if you want to make any money.

But what about those films which resolutely refuse to do this, and which concentrate on the real, or a more real, contemporary Britain? Do they have anything more interesting to tell us?

I wrote a review for this magazine of Trainspotting which praised it to the hilt, and later responded to criticism, defending it. After a third viewing, I think there is much in Trainspotting which is wholly depressing. It’s an impressive piece of film-making technically (until it suddenly becomes a different film, when it moves to London), and it has some great, funny moments. But like its makers’ predecessor, Shallow Grave, what Trainspotting seems to express is an essentially Thatcherite view that, “there is no such thing as society.”

When it was released, criticism focused on whether it glorified drugs, and it still seems to me odd to think that it does more than explore why people enjoy drugs, and the bulk of the action is about how bad drugs can be. But what is disturbing about the film is not simply that it describes the lives of its characters as empty, pointless, and without meaning: it seems to celebrate this.

When Renton runs off with the loot at the end, what is this telling us? It’s only £10,000, so he’s hardly going to retire to Brazil with it, so what is he going to do? “Choose life,” he says. It’s a joke about government anti-drugs campaigns, and a comment on how dull “normal” life is, although there is some suggestion that this is what Renton has decided he wants. There’s a firmly ironic tone to this conclusion, but what precisely it means seems to me, at least, quite mysterious. Renton in reality has nowhere to go: and while this does, certainly, stand as a summary of the entire film, it’s not clear how we are supposed to feel about it.

As in Shallow Grave, on the face of it the last third or so of Trainspotting (foreshadowed by nothing before it) is about how money has destroyed friendships. But in both films, the friendships are empty — shallow — from the outset: it’s hard to take it as any criticism of money, or what money does to human relationships, because we are shown a world in which human relationships are pretty worthless. It’s not the bleakness of this view which depresses me: people are entitled to a bleak view of human beings. It is that it is not bleak. The ideal life into which Renton is apparently disappearing with his ten grand is one without any human relationships at all. But there is no hint of sadness or regret. There is no suggestion that director Danny Boyle et al care that society is disintegrating, if, as it seems to me, they are saying. Rather, they appear to find it hilarious.

There is, undoubtedly, a good deal of zeitgeist here. This, maybe, is Britain in the 1990s: certainly the film’s success was because audiences, especially young audiences, found something with which they could identify. But what the hell do the film-makers think about it? They simply don’t seem to have an opinion. “Drugs” isn’t a theme or a meaning, it’s just a subject matter. What are we being told about the world through this subject matter? Frankly, God knows. In its own way it’s like Amerian movies which stand or fall by the novelty of their special effects: it’s dazzling, diverting — a kind of spectacle of fabulous displays. But peel way the distractions, and its heart — however anti-establishment, on one level — is the product of Thatcherism.

A director notorious for his bleak view of life (his first film was called Bleak Moments) is Mike Leigh. Secrets and Lies, which I think is his best recent film, is the least bleak probably in his entire output. The film almost has a happy ending: when the secrets are finally told and the lies confessed, it seems that these people might (very unusually for Leigh characters) learn to communicate with each other.

Leigh is often compared to Ken Loach and linked to the realist tradition. Anyone even slightly familiar with his work would know that this isn’t very accurate. Leigh’s world isn’t realist in any conventional sense: all his characters are one step away from caricature — or occasionally, not even a step — exaggerated, strange. On the whole, it is a grim account of British society, populated by vicious yuppies, and the helpless, often old or ageing, desperately struggling lower middle classes, who can never find the words to say anything of any consequence to each other. People treat each other terribly if they manage to relate to each other at all.

Yet there is a humanity, normally, to Leigh’s films which is a far cry from Trainspotting and its poor relations. Where the Boyle/Hodge/Macdonald films seem cheerful and exuberant and full of life, but underneath have no soul, Leigh’s seem depressing and dark and miserable, but in fact are full of life.

Nil By Mouth, written and directed by Gary Oldman, was compared to Mike Leigh, which again is odd. For this is a film wholeheartedly in the realist tradition, indeed probably the most “real” realism ever put on the screen by a British film-maker. It’s nothing like Leigh’s work, either in style or content. If Leigh’s world is the impoverished lower middle classes, Oldman’s is the lumpenproletariat. And there is no hint of caricature: this is a film-maker saying “let me show you my world, the world of my childhood — as it really is.”

Nil By Mouth is a bit Leigh-ish in its theme of people unable to communicate — except here they communicate by violence, which is rare in Leigh’s world. It’s a film which if you describe its action — a wife-batterer, her drug-addict brother, etc. — sounds unbearably grim. Yet somehow it also has a humanity, almost a warmth, which all the summers and deserts of The English Patient would not even be able to recognise. Gary Oldman cares about these people, even the wife-batterer based on his father. And I think because of that you don’t feel, when the characters have started to put their splintered lives back together, that you are presented with despair.

The film’s source material is Oldman’s childhood in 1960s and ’70s Bermondsey. But it feels intensely contemporary — about a section of the British working class with a disintegrated, or next to nonexistent, conception of itself as a class, ruined by drugs and alcohol and years of underachievement. Yet it is not a world without hope.

The Full Monty in a way addresses, although comically, similar issues — a Sheffield in which the steelworkers’ loss of their jobs has undermined their masculinity. In order to regain some self-respect as men they have to parade naked in front of women: they have no money, but the women, now, do. It’s a much more simple notion of masculinity being dealt with; but there is some parallel with Nil By Mouth.

It’s a charming film, and if the choice for most successful British film ever made is between this and Four Weddings, this gets my vote. There’s something a bit old-fashioned about The Full Monty: it reminds me, in style and tone, of eighties films like Letter to Brezhnev.

It is, of course, very slight, and to me dramatically rather unsatisfying: it ends very abruptly, leaving every real question hanging. They’ve got the money they need immediately; but anyone who’s been in debt knows an immediate windfall is an extremely temporary solution. And therefore the film is essentially a fantasy. Revealing their dicks to a roomfull of women has not only solved their immediate problem: the film asks us to believe it has solved all problems (impotence included).

You might object to this line of criticism that this is a comedy, so it’s not fair to ask too much of it. But I’m not sure. Comedy is, they say, a serious business. And this is a film which sets out to tackle serious issues, but with a light touch. The touch is light indeed; but it is possible even for comedies to be more consequential than The Full Monty manages to be. Brassed Off, about a miners’ brass band in a colliery due for closure, covers some of the same territory, and despite its flaws, manages to deal with serious issues, convey the pain its characters feel, and still hold on to an essentially light, often comic, tone.

So do these films, taken as a whole, reveal anything about either British film, or British society, on the eve of Mandelson’s Millennium? Recently there have been almost no “political” films about British politics. Loach has made a film about Spain in the 1930s and Nicaragua in the 1980s, but nothing about contemporary Britain since Ladybird, Ladybird, which wasn’t “political” even in the sense of slightly earlier films like Raining Stones, about an unemployed worker getting into trouble with a loan shark. In the 1980s there were a number of British political thrillers (Defence of the Realm, for example, about “official secrets”), but nothing much of that sort lately. Interestingly, there have been quite a large number of films, including very recent releases, about Northern Ireland.

It is striking that television has tackled much bigger political subjects than the cinema, but even here they are of quite a different nature than 1970s television drama. It’s hard to imagine Days of Hope being made now, still less Trevor Griffiths’ Bill Brand, a series about a left-wing Labour MP (partly of course because there are so few such MPs). There was Our Friends in the North. But absolutely nothing of that sort has come near a cinema screen.

It hardly needs to be spelled out that this is due to the change in the overall political climate. Whatever the readers of Workers Liberty feel about it, we live in a world in which people are sceptical of socialist, or any kind of overtly political, messages. The generation that wrote the socialist-inspired dramas of 1960s and ‘70s television, few of whom broke into film anyway (and when they did, like Griffiths, problematically), are older, perhaps find it difficult to speak to the younger generation, or indeed are dead. It’s hard to tell stories in which even the backdrop is class struggle, when there isn’t too much big class struggle to refer to. When films do refer to it, like The Full Monty does indirectly, or like Brassed Off refers to the miners’ strike, they do so retrospectively, addressing what has happened as a result of defeat.

And one way or another, all the recent films I have described which are set in Britain today are about a Britain which is essentially that of the Tories — understandably. We have yet to see the films which directly or indirectly address the Britain of New Labour. But they will come. Whether they satirise “spin doctors” and all the PR guff that goes with contemporary politics, or probe more deeply into what has happened to the old structures of society, including the labour movement, or, eventually, take their inspiration from the class struggle when it seriously resurges, there is and will be plenty to talk about.

Because I think this is the real point — the “structure of feeling” — which contemporary British film reveals. We live, globally, in a society in visible decay. The confidence films showed, their capacity to break boundaries, strike out new paths — in the 1960s, for example — was the product of a more confident age, in which there were a number of “certainties”. Many of those certainties were wrong, and awful. But now there are no certainties, or that’s how it seems. Artists — I’m sure this isn’t only true of film — don’t quite know what to say about the world. Some artists — like the makers of Trainspotting — throw up their arms in bewilderment, and say “Well, fuck it.” Quentin Tarantino does much the same thing. Others, like Anthony Minghella, can only hark back to a prettier and more romantic past.

More locally, in Britain we have moved into a new era, kind of, with the Labour Government. Film-makers are still digesting the recent past, which was a story of the loss of illusion, and with it, for the time being, a certain optimism and hope, and inspiration. If socialists are right that things are going to happen in the future, there will be new struggles and new ideas in society as a whole, that will bring with it a clearer “structure of feeling” to films. For now, we are in what you could call a “transitional” phase, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and what’s waiting round the corner. I think when we find out what’s there, and look back at ‘90s films, Nil By Mouth will be seen as a great movie; The Full Monty and Trainspotting will not. The English Patient will, I think, be thankfully forgotten.

Clive Bradley