MARY SHELLEY

In 1816 a young woman called Mary Shelley created the story of Frankenstein - the "monster" created by assembling corpses and revivifying them with electricity.  It's a story of an innocent, faithful creature misused by the real monster, Doctor Frankstein. The monster is violent and vengeful but also displays more humanity than his creator.  The woman who created this story was not just sensitive and romantic with a capital R, but deeply intelligent, well-read in the classics, fascinated by science - an active participant in the political and philosophical debates of the day. Her reputation as a radical philosopher may not be in the same league as that of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, but her fictional creation has achieved more fame, and argued more powerfully for the radical cause. And yet history has diminished her - describing her more often as the scandalous girl seduced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, keeper of his artistic legacy, and almost by chance creator of a gothic masterpiece. Only very recently has she been subject to serious intellectual enquiry. And in this film I had hoped to see a similarly respectful portrayal of this radical woman.

The film is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far or deep enough. It is very good at portraying Mary as a naive silly little girl who falls for a charming but vain and capricious seducer.  But it makes a fateful and disrespectful error in portraying her as being extremely passive. She watches and observes as men show her things - articles of galvanism or gothic paintings - which will work their way into her famous book.  But nowhere does it show Mary to be an active agent in her intellectual life.  There's nowhere that we SEE Mary as interested in science. We're just told by a bunch of male characters that she is.  The result is a heroine that is admirably free of cant, but one that is frustratingly passive. And it becomes very difficult to understand why she keeps returning to her emotionally abusive husband because he too is a pretty face. If there's no credible intellectual spark between the too, what's there to engage with?

That said the film is occasionally worth watching for the odd engaging performance - Tom Sturridge gets Byron exactly right.  But dialogue that is occasionally anachronistic, too conscious of the #timesup movement, and lead characters who are too thinly drawn, undermine the entire project. 

MARY SHELLEY has a running time of 120 minutes.  The film is available to rent and own.

STILL LIFE

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To some of the marketing, one might think Uberto Pasolini's new film STILL LIFE is a quirky romantic comedy starring the maid from Donwton Abbey.  But it's something far more interesting: a patient, elegiac wryly observed drama about a lonely man who does his best for those forgotten by society.  He's charged by the local council with finding the families of the people who die alone and unloved, and if he can't, he uses what he has pieced together of their lives to give them a touching funeral, attended only by him.  This man, Mr May, is a gentleman in every sense of the world, but he's become detached from life, in a well-ordered but solitude existence. As we watch him delicately pick his way through the lives of others we see clearly the trajectory he is on, and wonder how conscious he is of it: that he too will die alone, unloved and perhaps undiscovered.  

FILTH

Irvine Welsh's Filth was a novel of characteristic brutality and dark humour - depicting corruption, drug abuse, sexual perversion and decadence in contemporary Scotland with an unflinching stare and a complex prose style.  Notoriously, part of the novel was narrated by the tapeworm living inside of police officer Bruce Robertson's abused gut.  Hilariously, the tapeworm later becomes sentient and helps us diagnose the true root of Bruce's current emotional breakdown.

Writer-director John S Baird's approach to the novel is one of courage in taking on the grim subject matter, with barely any concessions to the censors, as well as a pragmatic and inventive approach to solving the tapeworm problem. Rather than trying to do some kind of bizarre POV a la Terry Gilliam, he's given Bruce a nutty psychiatrist, Dr Rossi, who in surreal nightmarish visions does much of the work the tapeworm did, with some nice visual pointers for the book fans.  The result is a movie that is loyal to the spirit of the novel but understands that to make a coherent film you sometimes have to make drastic changes.

So, on to the meat of the film.  Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy) is a nasty corrupt drug-addled cop determined to screw over every departmental colleague in his mission to get promoted. That said, his sense of dark mischief doesn't extend to making trouble for some concrete end - he'll happily taunt his best friend's wife with sexually harassing phone calls, or spike said friend's drinks with drugs and leave him freaking out in a hotel room, for no reason at all.  As the movie progresses, we realise that there is some cause to this malevolence - or perhaps causes - rooted in an unhappy home life in the past and present (isn't it always!)  Thank god the movie makes all of that sound far less hackneyed than the description just sounded.  And even when the movie introduces a character explicitly designed to make Bruce question his morality, it doesn't give him an easy out.  

The framing device for the film is the investigation of the murder of a kid by a group of nasty violent teens in an underpass.  The irony is that despite his deeply unethical methods, Bruce is actually apparently fairly good at investigating the murder - apparently.   But let's be honest, that's not what this movie is really about. It's a character study - or a study of Bruce's psychosis - a study of just how far a human being will descend into mayhem in order to avoid the truth.   And in amidst all that, we have lurid, sleazy, darkly funny visuals and cameos - John Sessions as the homophobic head of department who dreams of writing screenplays - Shirley Henderson as the deliciously sex-starved middle-class wife throwing herself at her phone stalker - and of course Eddie Marsan as her husband, the repressed accountant.   But really, this movie belongs to James McAvoy who throws himself into an incredibly challenging and provocative role and is utterly compelling throughout.  It's his real emotional trauma that keeps us anchored in a movie that would otherwise be a confusing and alienating mess of nastiness.

FILTH has a running time of 97 minutes.

FILTH opened earlier this year in the UK, Hungary, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Serbia, Slovenia, Finland and Japan. It opened last weekend in Australia and New Zealand. It opens in Lithuania on December 6th, in Estonia on December 13th and in the USA in 2014.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 3 - IN OUR NAME

IN OUR NAME is the incredibly impressive debut feature from young British writer-director Brian Welsh. Shot largely by a group of ex-NFTS students typically on their first feature, and starring relatively unknown British character actors, the resulting movies stands simply on its merits - it's powerful, provocative, well-acted, and dripping with integrity. It's one of the most powerful films I've seen in the Festival to date, and easily one of the best films of the year. Apparently, it's getting a limited release in Curzon cinemas, and I would strongly encourage you to seek it out.

The story is set in contemporary Newcastle. A young mother, Suzy, comes back from Iraq, traumatised by what she has seen there. She comes from a family that has seen considerable military service, but she gets little sympathy. Her husband, also a soldier, is frustrated at her distance from him, and while the army could potentially offer therapy, Suzy is reluctant to ask for help when that could affect her chances of promotion. And so, Suzy is stuck in a nightmare - no help from family or the army - and increasingly paranoid that her little girl is in danger, and convinced that in saving her daughter, she will find her redemption.

Joanne Froggatt (DOWNTON ABBEY) is absolutely amazing in the lead role - utterly convincing, tremendously sympathetic - her performance is genuinely haunting - a word that is usually used lazily and as a cliche but really does apply here. But you also have to admire Brian Welsh's script and direction. In particular, I love the fact that he shows, rather than tells, and that he manages to portray complex situations with a very austere script. For instance, look at the way he handles inter-racial tensions in northern towns with large muslim communities. In just one conversation in the back of a cab, you get different viewpoints, and a sense of the extreme tension.

So, I don't do this often, but I repeat, IN OUR NAME is an important and deeply affecting film and you should go see it.

IN OUR NAME will be released by Curzon cinemas later this year.