A ROYAL NIGHT OUT

This year sees the anniversary or many a military event, not least the Battle of Waterloo which I am covering in real time with my @relivewaterloo twitter account. One of those anniversaries is the 70th anniversary of VE or Victory in Europe day. Many of us have grown up with iconic images of that night - the crowds partying in Trafalgar Square and the Mall.  Set against that backdrop, this movie - A ROYAL NIGHT OUT - is a very mild and respectful depiction of what might have happened if Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had been given permission to celebrate VE Day among the masses.  The movie sees them beg permission of their parents, then hit the Ritz where Princess Margaret (true to later reform) manages to give her chaperones the slip and have a fine old time everywhere from the Ritz to a Soho brothel to the Chelsea Barracks. Meanwhile, her earnest elder sister, Princess Elizabeth tries to track her down with the reluctant help of working class airman Jack.

RED RIDING - 1974 - Less slippery and subversive than the novel but well put together nonetheless

1974 is the first of three films produced for television by Britain's Channel 4, based on the "Yorkshire noir" novels of David Peace. Each of his four books, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, is about the corruption of policeman, priests, politicians and businessmen who murder and extort for no reason other than that they can. There never seems to be much money or success to be had from it, other than protecting the status quo. These crimes are posited as endemic in a region crippled with obsolete heavy industry and chippy toward outsiders. The greatest tragedy is to think you can remain an outsider - a cool observer - and that you can affect change. West Yorkshire is a law unto itself, and that law is policed by West Yorkshire's Finest, and spun by the compliant journalists of the Yorkshire Post. David Peace's world is one of almost complete corruption and casual evil. There are no heroes, but there are characters through whom we investigate the world and with whom we come to empathise.

In 1974, that character is a cocky young journalist called Eddie Dunford, newly back from a failed stint as a journo in Fleet Street, and desperate to make a name for himself by proving that someone is serially killing little girls despite the obfuscation of the rozzers; competition from senior crime reporter Jack Whitehead; and the powerful forces protecting a successful local property developer, John Dawson.

The movie is directed by Julian Jarrold, whose previous directorial efforts included the painfully superficial and hi-gloss remake of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. 1974 is a far more successful film. Shot in sepia tones through the perpetual haze of cigarette smoke, the movie feels claustrophobic and sinister - just as it should. There's a superb scene where the camera looks over Dunford's shoulder through the patterned glass to a distorted image of Paula Garland - mother to a murdered girl - and soon to be Dunford's lover. That sums up Dunford: he sees through a glass darkly. And the tragedy of the film is that his eventual knowledge brings no relief. In a pivotal scene, he hands over a bag of documents - the research of his dead colleague Barry Gannon - to the one policeman he thinks is honest. Dunford is relieved - elated - as he drives toward his lover for an escape to the South. What a fool, the film-makers say, to think that he could actually escape the clutches of Yorkshire corruption. What a selfish, naive fool to think he could dump the files and fuck of to the South, where the sun shines.

Andrew Garfield is superb as Dunford - with his performance in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS - he has become an actor I will go out of my way to watch. Rebecca Hall is moving as his lover, Paula Garland. In John Dawson, Sean Bean finds yet another role that capitalises on his slightly sleazy charisma. But the real strength is the depth and quality of British character actors filling the cast, from John Henshaw as the harsh-but-fair Editor, to Peter Mullan's Reverend Laws.

The resulting film is atmospheric, sometimes like a bad dream, hard to hold on to, unnverving, and very hard to let go of. Tony Grisoni has done a good job in adapting a ferociously complicated novel for a hundred minute runtime, and cleverly compresses characters. What the film looses, however, is the sheer force of its brutality. The novel is hard work, both in terms of language and descriptions of violence and sex. Every time Julian Jarrold cuts away from a blackmail photo or pans away from a scene of torture, David Peace takes you into the mind of the aggressor. And where the worst crime Grisoni's Dunford can be accused of is naivety, and a final loss of temper, Peace's Dunford is a far more ambivalent character. If policemen casually rape whores, then in the novel Dunford treats women as casually and cruelly, though playing, as it were, in the minor leagues.

And, without ruining either, I found the "solution" of 1974 and the closing scenes too neat and twee, where they should've been more slippery and open-ended. Presumably this was the result of the compression of a large conspiracy into a single culprit but the result was that the ending felt rushed and just plain bizarre - the logic behind the killing was almost given as a throw-away line, and significantly undermines the slow build-up.

RED RIDING was shown on UK TV in 2009 and is available on DVD and on the Channel 4 4oD video on demand service.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED - so rudely forced

The following assumes familiarity with the novel and the 1981 TV series, and is replete with spoilers.

What is BRIDESHEAD REVISITED about? From that question follows all choices made by screen-writer Andrew Davies in editing down a novel replete with events, characters, superficial luxuriance and profound political and spiritual discourse. What is necessary? What is secondary? What can be safely altered to satisfy the exigencies of the two-hour film without changing the source-text or, worse still, render the result illogical?

For me, BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is an elegy for lost values. The values of discretion, discernment, elegance, friendship, love and faith in a world dominated by economic turbulence, vulgar ambition and the random cruelty of global war. People remember the novel for its depiction of the idyllic lifestyle of the British aristocracy - dreaming spires, champagne and strawberries, coming out balls in Mayfair and Venetian palazzos. But it's also a novel about General Strikes, mortgaged properties being demolished for modern apartment blocks, impending war and skeletal whores. To create a novel about an insular love story is to miss half the point.

The first fault of the film is its lack of elegance or subtlety. Take the early scenes at Oxford. We are introduced to Matthew Goode (a tremendously good performance) as Charles Ryder. He is a gentleman, from a good if not leading (with a capital "L") school. He is meant to be a little dazzled by the glamorous and beautiful Lord Sebastian Flyte, but he should not feel too lowly to be in their company. He cannot compete with Sebastian's eccentricities or Anthony Blanche's outré stories, but it was quite absurd to see Boy Mulcaster ask if he was from Eton, or gods preserve us, Winchester! After all, Evelyn Waugh makes quite a point of telling us that these boys are so well bred that they would not dream of letting on that they had not met Charles before. Andrew Davies confounds this error by allowing Charles to wear flannels to supper at Brideshead when everyone else is in White Tie. At every turn, Davies wants to bludgeon us with the idea that Charles is a lower class arriviste, and, on some level, simply after the house! By contrast, see how subtly Waugh exposes Charles with his sly little comment about Bellini.

The lack of subtlety stretches to the characterisation of each main character. Sebastian is portrayed by Ben Whishaw as a mincing alcoholic. Anthony Blanche looks about forty and is menacing rather than a piercingly observant eccentric. Julia (Hayley Atwell) is a repressed, obedient daughter with none of the independence or complexity of the novel. Lord Marchmain is an old rogue with none of the Byronic aura of Olivier's portrayal. And Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson) is a screen villain who speaks glibly about responsibility, destiny and faith.

This brings us to the second major flaw with this film. There is no "creamy English charm". Anthony Blanche had it perfectly, when he said that Sebastian and his family were simply dripping in charm and that they would catch Charles with it, and use him for their own ends. But the scant screen-time at Oxford never lets us see Sebastian seduce Charles with his charming lifestyle. And the portrayal of Lady Marchmain is utterly devoid of charm. She does not flatter one with intimacy and special attention, but commands with authority. It's very important to our continuing empathy with Charles that he doesn't realise that he is betraying Sebastian until after he has been drawn in. It is part of Charles' naivety that he believes that he can be Sebastian's true friend and a friend of the family up to the horrid Christmas as the final break. It is very important that Lady Marchmain should repent of her harsh words to Charles. If she cannot repent, then she is not human, and does not deserve our sympathy. And Emma Thompson's Lady Marchmain never does.

The third flaw is Andrew Davies' treatment of Julia. One of the most elegant symmetries in the novel is that Sebastian is Julia's forerunner - and that Sebastian must fade out of our sight for Charles to realise that he is in love with Julia. In this film, Julia is present throughout, staying at Brideshead during Charles and Sebastian's perfect summer and accompanying them to Venice. Because of this, we never see Charles enchantment with Sebastian and the secret world through the low door in the wall. Moreover, Julia is never an enigmatic, desperately glamorous, almost unattainable woman. Part of the joy of the relationship for Charles is that he has drawn down the moon - both with Julia and Brideshead. But in the film, she is simply the conventional best friend's sister.

In Andrew Davies' adaptation, Charles and Julia realise that they are in love early on - in Venice - in the full gaze of Sebastian and Lord Marchmain. This gives Andrew Davies a convenient hook upon which to hang Sebastian's plunge into alcoholism and flight to Morocco. I quite gasped when I heard the clumsy and anachronistic exit line "You only wanted to sleep with my sister". This motivation is crude and reductive. It also gives Davies a problem. If Julia and Charles know they are in love, why don't they simply marry? Davies "solves" this by making Lady Marchmain a pantomime villain, and Julia subservient. Mummy commands marriage to a Catholic of good family and Julia obeys. At this point, Davies would've been better off conjuring up a Bridey-esque dull Catholic aristo. For why on earth would Lady Marchmain have approved of Rex - a vulgar, Canadian, who, it is later revealed, wasn't even Catholic?

The obedient marriage gives Davies yet another problem. It was plausible that Julia might seriously consider a life "in sin" with Charles when she had already defied her Church in her marriage, and then in the affair which puts her on the Atlantic liner. By contrast, in Andrew Davies' script, I never believed that Julia would go through with it. She is always obedient, apart from a few weeks of passion with Charles. We didn't need Bridey's priggish comments, or the crisis at the fountain, or the arguments over her father's deathbed, to bring Julia back to the Church and away from Charles. We have to believe that Julia has led a life away from "his mercy" for us to benefit from the dramatic turnaround in the denouement and to feel the full force of what has been snatched away from Charles.

In the final scene, we are restored to Brideshead in World War Two and Charles makes no straightforward pronouncement of faith. He refuses to extinguish a candle in the chapel but the reasons for this are ambiguous - it could be out of respect for the memory of Sebastian and Julia rather than out of faith. Accordingly, the film looses the profound emotional charge of the final pages of the novel.

My abiding feeling at the end of the film was that it had been adapted by a screenwriter who didn't particularly like or understand the novel. Yes, one must be concise and lose plot threads, but to alter so profoundly the fundamental meaning of the novel is unforgivable. To answer my original question, BRIDESHEAD is a book about the complexity of friendship, love and faith. It is not about a man who lost a woman because he tried for a grand house but wouldn't convert to get it.

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED was released earlier this year in the US, Greece, the Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden and Denmark. It opens this weekend in Australia and the UK. It opens on October 23rd in New Zealand and Portugal and on October 31st in Norway and Spain. It opens in Germany on November 20th and in Belgium on January 9th.