Rescued by Rover (1905)
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Wonderland (2000)[Production Company: Revolution Films. Director: Michael Winterbottom. Screenwriter: Laurence Coriat. Cinematographer: Sean Bobbitt. Editing: Trevor Waite. Music: Michael Nyman. Cast: Shirley Henderson (Debbie), Gina McKee (Nadia), Molly Parker (Molly), Ian Hart (Dan), John Simm (Eddie), Stuart Townsend (Tim).] Following the lean years of the 1980s, there was something of a revival in British cinema in the 1990s, and in 1996, the number of UK films produced in a year reached a peak. (1) New filmmakers emerged with new approaches, Michael Winterbottom one of these. Michele Carmada, from Kismet films, approached Winterbottom to direct Wonderland from a script by French writer, Laurence Coriat, because of his ‘sense of aesthetics’ and his ‘ability to get great performances from actors.’ (2) The central performances, the portrayal of emotions and the visual flair validate this confidence, and make it an essential inclusion in this volume. Wonderland was released in the UK in January 2000. Funded by BBC Films and Polygram Filmed Entertainment, it was moderately budgeted at £4 million. Like most of his oeuvre, it was not particularly successful at the UK Box Office, making £395,498. (3) However it brought critical acclaim, winning the British Independent Film Award for Best British Film and was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Palm at Cannes. One of Britain’s most prolific filmmakers, Wonderland was Winterbottom’s sixth theatrical feature and by 2007 he had made a further six, with three more in production or pre-production. Ambitious and inventive, he first gained recognition in television for the hard-hitting Love Lies Bleeding (1993). His TV drama series, Family (1995), written by Roddy Doyle, was nominated for a BAFTA and won awards at the Torino International Festival of Young Cinema. It was this project’s subject matter that triggered Winterbottom’s interest in looking at ‘a family that is living separately.’ (4) In Wonderland, he brilliantly conveys the difficulties of everyday existence for an extended family as its members struggle to find some connection with other people. A contemporary ensemble piece, the protagonists are all London-based and each character is at a different stage in their life. Nadia (Gina McKee) is single and searching for love through ‘Lonely Hearts’ telephone introductions; her estranged brother, Darren (Enzo Cilenti), briefly in London for his birthday, is in a happy relationship. Younger sister, Mollie (Molly Parker), and husband, Eddie (John Simm), are expecting their first child. Older sister, Debbie (Shirley Henderson), a single mother, is separated from Dan (Ian Hart), Jack’s (Peter Marfleet) father, and enjoying commitment-free lovers. Parents, Eileen (Kika Markham) and Bill (Jack Shepherd), co-exist uncomfortably, with Eileen’s low mood exacerbated by the continuous barking of the neighbour’s dog. Bill sidesteps the flirtatious advances of lively neighbour Donna (Ellen Thomas), a single mother living with her children including older son, Franklyn (David Fahm). The three sisters dominate the screen, and through them, sharp observations about singledom and single motherhood are powerfully conveyed. Participation in rituals such as going to the hairdresser, a Bingo session, a football match and a firework display flesh out these characters and remind us that people need patterns to their lives. Different family groupings come together for specific reasons. Molly has her hair done by Debbie. Dan collects Jack from ex-partner Debbie’s flat. Sisters Molly, Debbie and Nadia meet in the coffee bar where Nadia works. Dan goes to Nadia’s home to seek Jack. With Debbie unable to accompany him due to the onset of Molly’s labour, Jack has taken himself to the promised firework display while Dan sleeps off a drinking session. Jack, Nadia, Dan and Debbie meet later in the Police Station. Eileen goes to the hospital to see Molly and her new grandchild, the same hospital to which Eddie is taken when he falls off his scooter after circling London all night in panic at impending fatherhood. Eddie and Molly are reunited in their separate wheelchairs in the hospital corridor and the name, Alice, is agreed for their newborn. The backdrop is London. Serving almost as another character, it determines the quality of their daily lives, and their mode of existence within it helps to define their personalities. St Paul’s Cathedral, the red buses and the Post Office tower signal the city known by tourists, but a different version is shown with litter, beggars, coffee shops, and bars full of drinkers. Constant traffic and trains wind their way through the city. The title, Wonderland, is partly ironic, describing London itself, as well as the world baby Alice is born into, the reference reminding us that life is often confusing and inexplicable. Cinematographer (and documentary-maker) Sean Bobbitt used a hand-held camera shooting on 16mm and his keen observational approach creates a vibrant and convincing portrait of contemporary city life. Wonderland reveals what happens to these characters over a long weekend and deliberate links are made between characters through careful juxtaposition of key scenes. Although most have endearing qualities, all the male characters fail the women. Bill cannot meet Eileen’s emotional needs. Dan’s incompetent fathering enrages Debbie. Eddie takes flight at a crucial time. His moment of departure is cut next to a shot of Dan squeezing his spots in the mirror before he heads out to the pub, leaving Jack ‘home alone’. Eddie’s rehearsed justification to Molly for quitting his job immediately prior to the birth of their child, performed while leaning on a bridge over the Thames, effectively conveys his confusion. Dan and Eddie are immature. Like Jack – the child – they leave the spaces they should inhabit, and all three suffer consequences. Jack absconds from Dan’s. His passage through the firework display is intercut with Eddie’s journey through London. For both there is a sense of being spellbound, in a ‘wonderland’, achieved through the camerawork on the fireworks, shot after shot of lights across the sky, and on the streets of London where Eddie drives. This impression is heightened by Michael Nyman’s intense music. Eddie’s scooter spins out of control in the shot immediately before Jack is mugged. Jack’s headphones are stolen and Eddie’s helmet comes off. Their shared vulnerability is made evident through the intercutting. Nadia’s search for love bookends the film. Over the opening credits, her words utter the profile she thinks single men will want to hear. When we finally see her, she is talking of her involvement with sport – walking, dancing – and, perhaps ironically, we see her blowing cigarette smoke from her mouth, eyes closed and slightly left of frame. The murky coloured background is later distinguished as the wall of the Ladies Room in a bar. A jump cut has her face tilted upwards, awkwardly filling the screen in such a big close up that her face is distorted. She draws on her cigarette. Her movements look gawky as the camera follows her face down and then up again. The next shot shows her at the right side of the frame drawing on her cigarette and then it swings round so that she is at the edge of the frame with smoke covering her face. The editing and the camera movement make evident her discomfort. This is typical of the camerawork throughout the film, as it varies from extreme close-up to movement around and behind the character it presents. Nadia checks her appearance in the mirror while the voice-over talks of ‘meeting someone looking for friendship or well, yeah, and possible romance.’ The ‘r’ of ‘romance’ is pronounced with ‘w’ and, in combination with her faltering words and use of the mirror, underlines her self-consciousness and discomfort at the ‘Lonely Hearts’ route to finding a soul-mate. She extinguishes her cigarette in the basin, which like the earlier smoke camouflage suggests that she is hiding this habit, and so something of her true personality, from her date. As Sarah Street argues, her attire, a ‘layered look’ (2001: 76), a see-through patterned top with vest showing underneath, also hints that there is more to her than is initially apparent. There follows her embarrassed return through the congested pub for stilted conversation. Nadia invents another toilet visit and walks out into the streets of London where speeded up images followed by slow motion powerfully convey the pace and intensity of city life in a kind of hyper-realism. In combination with Nadia’s earlier voice-over followed by the ambient sound of the bar, Nyman’s crescendos underline the mood of alienation. This sequence is intercut with scenes showing Nadia’s sisters relaxed in their own homes, Debbie in her high-rise flat, and Molly in more affluent surroundings, emphasising the connection but also the difference between the three women. Nadia abandons three dates. The second is when Dan pretends to be a new ‘Lonely Hearts’ introduction, and the third is after she has been left in no doubt as to Tim’s disinterest in her once intercourse is over. He grabs a beer, switches on the light, serves himself the remains of the supper he had previously cooked for them. He is only again shown in the same frame as Nadia when he restores the cushion she is still leaning on to its pre-intercourse position. Nadia’s embarrassment is clear as she dresses hurriedly. The close camerawork emphasises her vulnerability, as do her tears as she heads for home in the rain on a bus dominated by people loudly enjoying themselves. Her hunched demeanour throughout the film expresses lack of self-esteem. She is forceful only in her role as aunt, when confronted with Dan’s ineffectual response to Jack’s disappearance. In the final scene Nadia meets her father beside his unreliable car, and Franklyn (David Fahm), who has previously noticed her in her cafe, joins them, offering Bill his manual. As Nadia and Franklyn walk away side by side, Franklyn’s clumsiness as he trips over a drain makes them both relax into laughter. The final shot is from behind as these two walk towards the city, implying that here is someone to whom Nadia might become close without the aid of the dating agency. This incident, along with the birth of the baby, Mollie and Eddie’s reunion, the fatal poisoning of the barking dog, an answering machine communication from estranged Darren to his parents, all seem to suggest solutions to the major issues. These are small triumphs on the larger canvas of ongoing struggle for this city-dwelling family, each experiencing his or her own version of loneliness or alienation. Winterbottom’s films employ a plethora of genres and styles: literary adaptation, drama-documentary and romantic comedy amongst them. For this reason, critics have debated Winterbottom’s auteur status. He makes films frequently with the same industry professionals, which means a kind of technical and artistic consistency, despite the range of material, and runs Revolution Films with his main producer, Andrew Eaton, thus ensuring a degree of artistic freedom. Consistency of outlook is also evident. Loneliness and the experience of the outsider are regular themes in Winterbottom’s work, as is a commitment to revealing the injustice of real events. By his own account ‘the stories that interest me a lot involve deep emotions at some level.’ (6) In Wonderland the emotions occur as a result of everyday situations, but are as skillfully explored here as are those experienced by people living in a war zone, (Welcome to Sarajevo 1997) by asylum seekers (In This World 2002), or by men wrongfully imprisoned (The Road to Guantanamo 2006). Notes
Further Reading Xan Brooks, ‘Wonderland’, Sight and Sound, January 2000, p. 62. Anthony Kaufman, ‘Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland’, indieWIRE, http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Winter_Michael_000728.html “, 28 July 2000. Sarah Street, Dress Codes in Popular Film, London, Wallflower, 2001. Cathy Poole My Summer of Love (2004) [Production Companies: Apocalypso Pictures and BBC Films. Director: Pavel Pawlikowski. Screenwriter: Pavel Pawlikowski. Co-writer: Micheal Wynne. Cinematographer: Rysard Lenczewski. Music: Goldfrapp and Will Gregory. Editor: David Charap. Cast: Emily Blunt (Tamsin), Natalie Press (Mona), Paddy Consadine (Phil), Dean Andrews (Ricky), Michelle Byrne (Ricky’s wife), Kathryn Sumner (Sadie).] Pavel Pawlikowski’s third feature film, My Summer of Love is a chimera with a rock solid centre, one where what we think we see may turn out to be fake, de-familiarised or fantasised. A coming-of-age story of two teenage girls falling in love, it sets up genre expectations which, like some of its striking visual moments, of schoolgirl hangings, drownings in baths, or a gothic ivy-clad house, are deceptive and unreliable. This is no fast-cut teen thriller, lesbian love killer or country house mystery with a twist: even though its narrative pace is fast, and its editing tight and economic. The lush and leisurely cinematography draws us in, to a self-sufficient dreamy land more evocative of European art house than its Brit-Grit roots might suggest. Fakes are everywhere in this film; the misrepresentations and de-familiarisations pervade the characters actions and their surroundings, just as the words ’fake’ and ‘real’ crop up constantly in their dialogue. Main character Mona’s very name is not real; as she explains to her counterpart, middle-class Tamsin, her name is Lisa; Mona is her brother Phil’s name for her, because she moans. Boarding school escapee Tamsin not only picks up the reference, but off-handedly claims to have ‘studied the original’, just as she proceeds to study Mona’s working class life. Mona’s responses are more intense - the opening credits see her drawing her own version of a Mona Lisa in crayon on her bedroom wallpaper, a ‘fake’ representation of Tamsin which she then kisses, in the absence of the real thing. It is a moment that presages the multiple crossovers of identity in the film, and a scene that viewers later realise is the only one displaced in time, out of sequence in this otherwise linear realist narrative, a flash forward from towards the end of their relationship to tantalise the viewer. Similar fakes scatter the landscape; Mona pushes around a scooter with no engine, her newly fundamentalist Christian brother presides over a pub with no beer, now given over to ’born again bingo’, while Mona offers Tamsin (and us) virtual voice-over sex as experienced with her married ex-boyfriend Ricky : ‘Do you want to be shagged by Ricky? Are you ready?‘ Location is a key focus for this fakery; Tamsin describes Ricky’s housing estate home as ‘like Lego – pretence’, it becomes the site for another verbal fantasy of sex, this time with a sour edge, as Tamsin imagines her father’s girlfriend (‘I bet she’s there now, bent over the cooker’) followed by the girls’ punishment of Ricky by visiting his wife to deliver a fantasised version of his unfaithfulness with Mona, involving ‘her abortion of your husband’s foetus’. These love revenges put a different light on Tamsin’s earlier assertion about their own relationship, gleaned from her school study of Nietzsche, that ‘this is what is real’. From the girls’ first meeting when the perspective of the shots disorientates, as Mona, lying on the grass, opens one eye and gives us a reflection of an upside-down image of Tamsin on horse-back, faking goes hand in hand with a cinematography of de-familiarisation to make all strange. As they begin their mutual mesmerization intimate close ups are inter-cut with distancing overhead and travelling shots of the two on the road, suffused by Goldfrapp’s haunting alien music. This impression is heightened in later shots where the landscape itself takes on an alien aspect of emptiness and geometric lines, from the cold light that pervades the setting for Ricky’s unceremonious dumping of Mona to the whitely over-lit halo of light from the prayer meeting that reflects back on Mona as she stands behind Phil’s dry bar. In contrast, Mona enters the alien greenery of Tamsin’s ‘fairytale’ home like a rescuing prince, magically unlocked doors stand open to a series of corridors like a maze in a folk tale through which she glimpses another life, lit with an ultra real, unaccustomed sumptuousness. ‘Now the pub is like a Temple,’ Mona tells Tamsin, an image echoed in the forest scenes of their lovemaking by religious images for a different transcendence at their favourite rock with water and fire (‘A strange cathedral,’ as Tamsin remarks). A recurring image of the girls lying sprawled on the ground, evocative of sex and of death, both draws and warns the audience, presaging the games both play with dying. When Tamsin’s outdoor cello playing (significantly Sain-Saens ‘Dying Swan’) accompanies a dance by Mona which ends in her falling to the grass, the tone of this, as often, is self conscious, both a parody of, and an embracing of, intensity, in imitation of their heroine Edith Piaf’s ‘wonderfully tragic’ life. But it also touches real loss and death, reminding us of the china swans Mona has packed away, from the time ‘The Swan’ pub was ‘real’, a gift from her mother who died of cancer. The core of Tamsin’s deception of Mona, which she builds up over several scenes in mounting detail, is the fantasised death of her sister from anorexia, again represented in bodily and folk lore terms – ‘my beautiful sister developed hair all over her body like a werewolf’. Gathering force cumulatively, the multiple faked images take on a more serious edge; as Mona reluctantly begins to inhabit her sister Sadie’s clothes her role as ‘other’ sister slides into our growing realisation of mixed transferences and identities. Visually the fantasy and realism mix inextricably: Tamsin stands nude at an ivy covered window in answer to Phil’s knocking, at once precocious teen temptress and imprisoned heroine, while the comic edge to Mona’s death-game playing of the faked hanging similarly links illusion and seriousness. As she escapes back to Tamsin it is monumentally self-deluded Phil who gives the prophetic warning ‘something’s not right with that girl, something drives her’. It is this particular mix of the fantastic, fantasy and fantasist, of comic re-playing and serious re-visioning that gives the film its ungraspable quality, and poses questions of reliability and truth, which the narrative style deliberately avoids. It also poses an intensity of sexuality and love, recognised and embraced by the girls despite all the pretence around and within their relationship, which spills out into the visual quality. Pawlikowski’s achievement is to portray the (self) deceit inextricably with the clear-sightedness, the consciously comic with the unconscious game-playing, and to suffuse all with an intense underlying real, the spiritual which he has claimed to find missing in everyday life. (1) This is partly achieved by the poetic quality of Rysard Lenczewski’s cinematography. Richard T Kelly has remarked that the effect for the viewer is the yielding of 'mundane reality', an impression heightened by ‘wistful cutaway shots’ taking us back to the location, of ‘ominous clouds, smoking chimney stacks, wisps of cigarette smoke rising from the heather’. (2) This aspect is set alongside, and given everyday gravitas, by a more realist aesthetic. Pawlikowski’s acclaimed second feature, Last Resort, followed the experiences of a Russian asylum-seeker and her son, in a British seaside town shot in grey uniformity, with mise en scene and experiences often resembling an East European police state. The lush English greenery of My Summer of Love is a negative reverse of this, being both iconic dream and accurate documentary. Pawlikowski, who spent his early years in Poland, became a BBC documentary-maker turned feature film maker (3) claiming as influences European filmmakers such as the early Emir Kusturica, but equally citing Ken Loach and 1960s British realist films. (4) He borrows from their methods of improvisation with actors, resulting in dominating and authentic performances from the young leads, relative new-comers Natalie Press and Emily Blunt (5) and pitch-perfect menace from the more experienced Paddy Consadine, a regular on Pawlikowski’s team. The film is based on the novel of the same title by Helen Cross, but Pawlikowski’s adaptation exchanges its political and social setting of a Britain of the 1980s riven by the miners strike for his enclosed timeless world of an apparently unending summer. Even so, key elements of the real are kept; the location in Yorkshire and Lancashire, is a major element of the film’s effects, as are the heavy use of realist methods of ambient lighting, and the mix of observingly distant swooping overheads and tracking with more intimately close, often hand-held, cameras. Pawlikowski points out the cross-over, commenting that he has always treated documentary as film, whereas the feature films he has most admired had their roots in neo-realism. (Macdonald and Cousins, 1998: 389) The effect is striking in the filming of the activities of Phil’s religious group; their prayer meetings are tracked round in over-held close-ups which mark their responses with all the detail of a documenting of cult activities, while the cutting between handheld close-ups and swooping overheads during the outdoor gathering to erect a giant cross to cleanse the valley moves the tone between the seriousness of the participants and the girl’s mocking undermining of Phil’s involvement. This mix is at its most effective when its shifts work subtly at the level of images which tap deeper into character and narrative. The sequence which begins as an emotional searching through the ’dead’ Sadie’s room, moves into a quasi-religious making of vows of eternal love over magic mushrooms found, folk-tale like, in a casket, and taken like communion bread. The glowing red transcendent lighting quickly shifts to that of hallucinatory white light, formerly mainly cast over Phil’s prayer meetings, and perhaps already hinting at fakery. This shifts again as the mists begin to clear and reveal the girls’ dancing transferred and now taking place at ex-shagger Ricky’s nightclub singing venue, from which they are forcibly removed. A further move to early morning light reveals an erotic ‘Babes in the Woods’, where Mona feeds Tamsin breakfast of blackcurrants at their favourite rock while Tamsin typically, breaks the spell first, with ‘Blackcurrants are not enough breakfast; I’m cold, I want to go home’. Economically shifting between its realities, almost wordless until Tamsin’s come-down, this sequence presages and prepares for the climactic scenes of the ending where Mona is forcibly disenchanted. This last scene ends inscrutably. Having demonstrated both her passion and her emotional strength in a final fake drowning scene, which takes the viewer through a roller-coaster possible alternative ending, Mona reaches her final vindication alone, walking away Valkyrie-like (6) to the same strains of Edith Piaf, which had celebrated their liberation as a couple: we watch her strides strengthen under the camera’s last shot of swooping away observation. Notes
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