Wednesday 20th Sept. Spend the day seeing two new film-festival-type films, Esma’s Secret and Red Road, which have a fair amount in common. At times they even seem like the same film, in the way that action blockbusters can resemble each other. Both have won awards at festivals, and this makes me wonder why arthouse movies are generally considered more edifying than mainstream popcorn fare.
You could argue it’s a question of ticking a a different series of boxes. ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ and ‘Me You And Everyone We Know’ are arthouse movies that seem so aware of their own genre, they are arguably just as formulaic as those Hollywood dramas seemingly created purely to win Oscars. The ones that feature someone with a disability or some other feature that singles them out. All those films have the same plot: A Struggle Against Adversity, Triumphing In The End. But the same is true of the arthouse scene.
The Popcorn Movie must make money. The Arthouse Movie must win film festival awards. The Popcorn Movie must have a certain amount of guns, explosions, or if it’s a romcom, it must finish with a last-dash declaration of love between people who were having a perfectly reasonable life anyway. The Arthouse Movie must try to Say Something about the Human Condition. But not too quickly. And the characters must be generally having a Hard Time throughout. One common feature of arthouse dramas is that information must be withheld, eventually released to the audience as a kind of chocolate-drop reward for sitting still for so long. Once we get The Awful Revelation, we can all go home.
Esma’s Secret was originally called Grbavica, taking its name from its setting: a grim suburb of Sarajevo. Red Road also takes its name from its location: an equally grim suburb of Glasgow. Both are about melancholic women living in the aftermath of some male-instigated trauma, hinted at but unspecified until the final reel. Not so much a Whodunit as a What-was-dun-to-her.
They’re both extremely well acted and directed, and seem terribly real; if it wasn’t for this sense of one box being firmly ticked: the one where you get the audience to stick around for the Awful Revelation. Once the audience feels they’re being strung along for a chocolate drop, as I did, the realism suffers somewhat. And it’s unfair to everything else about the movie. Particularly ‘Red Road’, which has an incredible emotional pull and is otherwise full of original images and ideas.
I was reminded how well ‘Mysterious Skin’ deals with this problem, by following two characters: one is trying to find out the Awful Truth, while the other knows it all too well – and we’ve all been privy to it from the off. To put the shocking secret at the start of the movie rather than the end sidesteps this cliche altogether, while still keeping the audience in suspense, as we get to follow the character in the dark. A building up and an aftermath at the same time.
I suppose wanting to steer away from being accused of boxes-ticking is a kind of box-ticking in itself. Go one step further, and you could say that life can be boiled down to just ticking the right boxes, too. Happiness, tick. Money, tick. Realising your potential, tick. Paying the rent, tick. Perhaps the Afterlife is just filling out a survey form like everything else.
When critics die, do they judge their life out of five stars? Do they look back on their life as an ‘adrenaline-pumping powerhouse’ or a ‘rare treat’ or ‘powerful’?
Dickon Edwards – Nominated for A Lifetime’s Lack Of Achievement Award.
