An intense character study of loneliness and mourning, tucked into a CCTV-p.o.v. portrait of grimmer Glasgow, disguised as a white-knuckled surveillance-age thriller, Andrea Arnold’s film follows a camera operator for the Scottish city’s string of public eyes, charged with tracking potential–and reporting actual–crimes. Borrowing neatly from Rear Window and The Conversation alike, the film also escapes its influences, wears them lightly on its sleeve. And I’m going to be cagy about what else happens in the film–burying it under the “more” and a big SPOILER tag–because the film is often quite surprising. Don’t want to undercut those pleasures.
Even as I tout this film, though, I want to first rave about one of the extras, the director’s short (and apparently Academy-Award-winning) Wasp, which in 23(ish) minutes packs a helluva wallop. Following a young single mom, trailing her three girls and lugging her infant boy, from an opening fight to their cluttered project flat to a night out on the town, the film seems to be both brilliantly composed and edited and yet caught on the fly–there are scenes in a bar that seem impossibly real, as if she had to be in there just filming. Yet it’s a gorgeous picture of dilapidated people and places, and edited with a virtuoso control–precisely crafted. This is a classic. Red Road is simply really damn good.
SPOILERish: What intrigues me about the feature film is its complex take on revenge. We’ve discussed elsewhere, and ad nauseam?, the manifold varieties (or, I hear the cough in the back of the room, the dull repetitive simplicity) of male portraits of violence, of men trapped in cycles of violence, of an urge toward revenge as a method for revealing a complex critique of violence. Arnold’s protagonist has lost her husband and daughter, and she’s tracking the killer. I won’t go into it much more–even that much I had to figure out along the way–but I am fascinated by the way she catches the guy, her determination as familiar to this fan of revenge flicks as many prior (male) protagonists… but there is a scene where she has sex with the culprit which is both explicit and yet unexploitatively … I want to say celebratory; she seems to achieve a real bliss. I’m really wondering how others would read this–her desire supplanting her revenge, or supplemented by it? I am not sure.
And then the film slips off in other directions, regardless.
Plus, again–the film is edited beautifully. I have no idea how they shot all that surveillance-cam footage, let alone pieced it together into a seamless and suspenseful flick.
Highly recommended.
THIS COMMENTS SPOILS EVERYTHING.
i liked this too, though maybe not with the same abandon as mike. but i liked it. since i am obsessed with the way male and female filmmakers represent men and women, i’ll say that, again, i’m terribly pleased by the way this woman filmmaker complicates a rape scene and, especially, by the way she makes the male villain tamer and sweeter than any male filmmaker probably would have under similar circumstances. it seems to me that male-made thrillers relish manichean portrayals of men, with bad guys being really, awfully bad, and good guys being good in all sorts of prefabricated ways.
aside. i have just seen the brave one, a really bad film that is also a revenge flick but should not be allowed to share even just a comment with red road, and oh-my-god, can men be more brutal and animalesque?
aside no. 2. i also just saw this film is not yet rated, a cool documentary whose two main points are, it seems to me, that the super-secret MPAA rating gang hates a) gay sex and b) female pleasure.
b) comes to mind in the scene mike describes, which is the pulsating heart of this film and as poignant, complex, and rich as any scene in which jackie enjoys the simple adventures of a small number of people she’s become familiar with through her surveillance work. her pleasure in these people’s little moments of joy (a janitor who dances at the silent tune of her walkman while doing her night cleaning; a man whose dog is sick and dies getting a new dog) and one-way-only familiarity with them is carried over, in some complicated way, in her intense and clearly unfaked pleasure in the sexual encounter she engineers to frame the killer of her husband and daughter. the pleasure, in other words, is all inside; it doesn’t arise from interaction, it arises from psychological meanderings and solitary decisions.
when at some point she decides to approach the man with the dying dog, jackie is clearly desirous of conversation but cannot bring herself to break the fourth wall.
which reminds one of the lives of others, which could very well have been the title of this film.
in the sex scene it is also pretty fabulous that clyde turns out to be a sensitive, sweet, expert lover, who, after jackie hastily departs, shouts “so all you wanted was a shag, hey?” clearly, that was not all he wanted, despite his blustering and barking and macho-posturing. he’s as desperate for human connections and new starts as she is.
but while he’s genuinely enjoying having sex with her, she’s fulfilling a fantasy all of her own, to which he is a mere pawn. maybe she’s finally punishing herself for having shouted at her daughter just before clyde unintentionally killed her, and this punishment is climactic and orgasmic and cathartic and very sweet.
i’m not crazy about the happy solution, jackie tying loose ends and strolling happily down glasgow central. but i am crazy about the loneliness of the long distance surveiller, brought to us by lives of others and reiterated here (this is actually an earlier film). and i am crazy about the filmmaker’s critique of the surveillance society, which cannot be critiqued too strongly or too passionately.
simon is getting upset. he seems to think i should clarify that no rape occurs in this movie. when i referred to the sex scene as the rape scene, i should have used inverted commas. i hereby amend that mistake. since my comment was addressed to those who had already seen the film, i though the inverted commas would be understood.
it is, in some ways, a rape scene: a complicated rape scene that doesn’t happen in the usual modalities.
simon, have you seen the fucking film????
OK, this is Simon (Arnab – can I get my own login?).
That scene is not a rape scene in any modality. She goes there with the intention of having sex with the guy, she never changes her mind, she engages in it with gusto and enjoyment (as you note). What could be different to make it less a rape?
this is gio. can the thrilling exchange that is bound to ensue devote precisely zero time to whether the consensual sex scene should be called a “rape” scene or not, pretty please?
Gio-
Your comments, particularly regarding Jackie’s resistance to actual interaction, and thus the ‘interiority’ and almost solitary nature of her pleasure in the sex scene — well, they’re smart. Damn smart.
And I’m puzzling over ’em, because there is an earlier sex scene, with a co-worker–it seems like he and Jackie have arranged a weekly shag, which means little, and (it seems, given the way Jackie behaves in that scene) feels like even less. I’m curious if *that* doesn’t expose a desire to actually connect with people, an experience which is frustratingly empty.
This may reinforce your point: maybe only by *not* trying to connect to others, by playing her own self-contained con on others, can she free herself up to revel in personal pleasure. And that makes some psychological sense.
But I’d throw out two potential counter-readings, neither of which I’m wedded to but both of which seem somewhat plausible:
a) Jackie isn’t out to experience pleasure–she’s out to hurt another, someone who’s hurt her. This demands connection; the pleasure of revenge, it strikes me, demands her personal engagement. (She could, after all, make his life hell from the grim security of the surveillance center.) But it is ironically this actual engagement with others which both frees her to feel pleasure which is NOT tied simply or merely to power over them. She has a real human connection, however completely physical, and this frees something up in her–allows her to be her self more fully and freely than she had been in any other scene in the movie.
b) Or–the bleak misanthrope in me–Jackie’s pleasure in that scene is not carnal but cruelly vengeful; her ecstasy is exactly the control she is exerting over him, he’s literally groveling for her pleasure, and the recognition of what she knows is to ensue. (More on this in a second.)
She recovers or discovers some empathy with him afterwards, not during–and perhaps her empathy emerges when she sees again, from a distance and without actual interaction, his daughter coming to find him. It is her ability to see and know people ‘behind the scenes’, in public but without awareness of an audience–her knowledge as a surveillor–which frees her to better empathize.
Another point: the sex scene–I find it interesting how it’s shot, so that at the moment of her ecstasy we are still in the dark about her ulterior motive. As far as I knew while watching, she … well, I had no real clue why or how she found her way into this situation and felt this pleasure. It was both revealed and mysterious to me as a viewer. This is one of the reasons why I found the film so powerful–that sense of the complexities of internal life despite the omnipresent view of these people, even our protagonist a mystery to us, although we’ve never not been in her company through the whole movie. (And, yeah: The Lives of Others is an excellent companion to this film.)
Did you watch the short Wasp? I ask because in looking around a number of the reviews–well, there were admittedly just a couple–slammed Arnold’s class sensibilities, as if she was exploiting from a middle-to-upper-class perspective a vision of the bleak poor, as if her politics were suspect if not actually conservative. And I couldn’t disagree more; I was actually surprised to see these comments. (The two sharpest critiques both referenced a “superior” Ken Loach or Mike Leigh, and I’m trying to get a handle on the possible reading of gender and politics we might untangle in this critique.)
There–I avoided discussing “rape,” especially avoiding the temptation to ask if we could see Jackie as the aggressor…
mike, sorry for not replying to this sooner.
a) is beautiful and also dead-on, i think. it is rather startling, given her MO with everyone else (see the scenes we have already mentioned, and also her not wanting to go to the wedding and leaving early), that jackie should put her physical body so much inside the red road council housing complex. it is particularly startling because she knows she can be seen by her buddies at the city eye place. the fact that she is in front of the cameras is intensely present to the viewer. those are areas we have seen only on surveillance screens until them. it’s dangerous, it’s self-exposing, it’s totally vulnerable, and she doesn’t care. i agree with you that that’s a (desperate?) way for her to reach out and re-establish connection. that she’s angling, with hindsight, to be raped, is besides the point. as you said, she could have make clyde’s life difficult from behind the cameras (though she coldly uses the cameras to nail him).
there is, by the way, no reason for her to anticipate that he’ll fall for the rape plot. we don’t know it, but she does. it’s as if she considered sex the only way to connect with this guy, and since she wants to catch him, she goes for the sex bait, using her own body. she could have induced him to steal or use drugs or whatever, but that’s what she goes for.
and b) seems true too. the beauty of this film is that it makes room for a whole complex host of motives, without solving them. jackie is a great character because she is so realistically complex, without being terribly complicated. you say it well:
haven’t watched the short yet because i lent the dvd to a neighbor and just got it back. more about it later (if i have something to say).
i too am surprised by the criticisms you report, based on class. i actually felt the opposite. it’s a grim world out there on red read (and, by the way, i live on red road, too, albeit some few thousand miles away, so that’s another layer of identification right there), but i couldn’t help feeling that it was all right, too, alive in some way, cool, welcoming. at the same time, there was some poignant social commentary, right? these guys trying to go straight but living in such hopelessness…
but then, who am i to say this? i’m speaking from my own middle-class miamian perspective, from the dreariness of mini-malls, large highways with no sidewalks, no pedestrians anywhere except in south beach where most of the pedestrians are not locals, and basically no community life. i’d take red road, glasgow, and a watered-down cup of tea over this urban dissociation any day because it’s totally inhuman to live in a place in which the only people you bump into are at the supermarket and two glass panes away at the traffic signal.
(is she really middle-upper-class? she’s just a lousy city employee, no?)
I’ll be reductive, but I’m filing this one under the category “If only women ran the world.” I’m not going to add much to the above entries except to say the final twenty minutes or so are absolutely riveting. For a while I felt as if the film made loneliness somewhat sexy–romanticized even–aren’t we drawn to representations of loneliness even as we, mostly, avoid the lonely (ah Eleanor Rigby, should I really avert my eyes) in our daily lives. There is something existentially satisfying about the lonely, I suspect, because in one way or another we know the feeling intimately and have wallowed in it as much as any other possible response to such anxiety ridden moments of pure alienation; it was certainly always a good reason to pop in a video cassette or listen to The Mountain Goats. Though I did enjoy Wasps, which I saw a couple of years ago online after it won the Academy Award (in 2004?), I must admit that short did feel somewhat like Ken Loach redux. At the time I was more intrigued by Lynne Ramsey’s poetic lyricism than Arnold’s social realist take on working class female subjectivity. Still, there is something very interesting about this woman who gazes upon the world but in the end practices compassion while seeking personal redemption. And Clyde was damaged goods but still a man worth one’s compassion, I think. Not an easy film to love, but definitely one worth seeing.
jeff, do you know “mercy now” by mary gauthier? that’s what you comment made me think of. fine song.
I liked this a lot, though I’m pissed off that I returned it to Netflix without checking out the extras and so missed ‘Wasp’. I must say that I found the use of the surveillance screens to be the real stunner here. The early scenes of grainy CCTV footage which we, the audience, have difficulty deciphering, give an otherworldly quality to the movie. Frankly, I couldn’t identify the main protagonists for the first half hour, so the sense of just following the flow, rather than knowing what was going on was enhanced — to good effect.
I did not like the last 10-15 minutes. It was too pat and too happy. It appears to be brought on by Jackie’s knowledge that Clyde has a daughter, so she forgives him — or at least there are these moments when she blames herself for wanting her husband and daughter out of the house, with tragic consequences. I was deeply moved by the ‘Crossing Guard’, as almost any parent would be, but it is a much less satisfying movie than this and it was a pity to see ‘Red Road’ tip in that direction (redemption, forgiveness) near the end.
I’m not sure how to interpret the sex. Certainly, I agree with Reynolds that the “weekly shag” is utterly joyless, and Jackie is presented to us at the beginning of the movie as emotionally closed down, distant for in-laws, siblings and parents. The sex scene with Clyde is — again as Reynolds points out — impossible to separate from the fact that we don’t know, and I assume most of us are guessing, what the history between Jackie and Clyde is. I had decided (you can see why I don’t play the lottery), based on the fact that Clyde had some vague memory of Jackie but did not recognize her, that she was in the process of a sex change. So I watched the sex scene trying to figure out if a moment would arrive when Clyde would discover this. But regardless of that total failure to understand the movie, playing the sex scene before we know the truth was a very effective way of complicating that scene.